Freedom to Read Protection Act of 2003

The Freedom to Read Protection Act of 2003 (H.R. 1157) was designed to limit the federal government’s ability to access private reading records under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The bill would have prohibited the FBI from seeking court orders to obtain personally identifiable information about patrons from libraries or bookstores for the sole purpose of monitoring their reading habits or book purchases.

For the average citizen, this legislation aimed to protect the privacy of what they read or buy by ensuring that federal investigators could not use anti-terrorism laws to track their intellectual interests without broader criminal justification. Additionally, the bill sought to increase government transparency by requiring the Attorney General to publicly report on how often these types of information requests were made and to analyze their effectiveness in protecting national security.