Some time after 911, the FBI started asking colleges to divulge what library books their foreign students had checked out. This would seem more innocent than bulk purchase of ammunition, but they still asked for it anyway.

This makes me wonder, what does a terrorist read? Can you tell that apart from, say, the books that a student checked out for his term paper on terrorism and American foreign policy? Or what about students who became curious about terrorism after 911 and wanted to learn more about it by borrowing liberally from the library? Half of the kids I knew from my teenage years bought a copy of the Anarchist's Bomb-Making Guide or some such ridiculous title from Tower Records because it was considered cool. They couldn't pass high school chemistry if their lives depended on it. Would the FBI explore this embarrassing, pimpled past of many otherwise unremarkable Americans?

I don't know whether the colleges complied. Usually libraries are cash-strapped, and librarians don't typically track a particular individual's reading habits. I'd also think that the colleges would be worried about privacy issues and their legal liability. I'm hoping that the attention on preppers will turn out to be another one of these things. Like someone said, maybe it's an intern's summer project.

Da Bing