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C&RL News September 2013 446

Jazzy Wright is press officer of the ALA Washington 
Office, e-mail: jwright@alawash.org

W a s h i n g t o n  H o t l i n eJazzy Wright

ALA actively opposes NSA surveillance
In response to June revelations on the National 
Security Agency’s (NSA) secret surveillance 
practices, ALA has called on Congress to 
provide more accountability and transparency 
about how the government is obtaining and 
using vast amounts of information on innocent 
people. In July, ALA launched “ALA Liberty,” a 
new privacy Web site that contains tools that 
librarians can use to host educational sessions 
and public forums that help Americans under-
stand their First and Fourth Amendment rights. 
ALA has joined an unprecedented coalition 
of Internet companies and advocates—such 
as Apple, the American Civil Liberties Union, 
the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center 
for Democracy and Technology, Facebook, 
and Twitter—to demand greater transpar-
ency around national security surveillance 
of Internet and telephone communications. 
In late July, ALA urged library advocates to 
support the Amash amendment, a bill that 
would have stopped funding NSA’s warrantless 
surveillance programs as part of the Defense 
Appropriations bill. The amendment failed in 
the House 205-217.

Bestselling authors call for library 
e-book lending
In June, ALA announced the launch of “Au-
thors for Library Ebooks,” a new initiative that 
asks authors to stand with libraries in their 
quest for equitable access to e-books. “Authors 
for Library Ebooks” represents an extension of 
ALA’s advocacy strategy to ensure all people 
have access to the world’s knowledge and 
literature through our nation’s libraries—re-
gardless of format. Over the past 18 months, 
ALA leaders have met with major publishers, 
distributors, authors, and representative as-
sociations to seek sustainable solutions for 
library e-book lending. Developed by ALA’s 
Digital Content and Libraries Working Group, 

the Authors for Library E-books campaign 
encourages authors to sign on to a statement 
of shared values, to discuss the issue with 
their publishers, and to raise awareness of 
their concerns through their Web sites, social 
media, and other communications channels.

WIPO passes the Treaty for the Blind
In June, the World Intellectual Property Or-
ganization (WIPO) Assembly made history 
by passing the “Treaty to Facilitate Access to 
Published Works by Visually Impaired and 
Persons with Print Disabilities” (the “Treaty for 
the Blind”). By passing what is an exception 
to copyright, WIPO demonstrated that there is 
international support for balance in copyright 
law. In the last day of negotiations, WIPO 
delegations reached consensus on a number 
of issues, including the three step test, the use 
of technological protection measures, and fair 
use and fair dealing as stakeholders made nu-
merous concessions. By all accounts, however, 
when the treaty goes into effect, nations with 
exceptions for the disabled will be able to 
share accessible content across borders. Librar-
ies will be considered “authorized agencies” 
that can make accessible copies without the 
prior permission of the rights holder.

E-rate moves forward
E-rate, the federal program that provides hun-
dreds of millions of dollars to the library com-
munity each year, is undergoing a revamp. The 
Federal Communications Commission will con-
sider a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to mod-
ernize the e-rate program to support high-speed 
broadband for digital learning technologies. In 
July, Maine State Librarian Linda Lord called for 
a “proactive vision for meeting the educational 
and learning needs of our communities for the 
next 15 years and beyond” at a hearing of the 
U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, 
and Transportation. Lord touted the success of 
the e-rate program in helping connect nearly 
100 percent of libraries to serve more than 30 
million people every week.