Last week, the Department of Justice asked that public libraries destroy five public documents that the department deemed not “appropriate for external use.” The documents, two of which are texts of federal statutes, cover forfeiture and include information on how citizens can retrieve items that may have been confiscated by the government during an investigation.

Yesterday, the DoJ reversed that decision after the American Library Association submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for the materials in order to obtain an official response from the DoJ. Now the publications will remain in libraries. If the libraries had followed the DoJ’s request the documents would only have been available to those who have access to a law office or law library.

(via Boing Boing)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 3rd, 2004 at 2:23 pm by Sho and is filed under National. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.