Startling Revelation Raises Critical Question: Why Was A Private Government Spy Agency With The “Federal Government as Practically Its Sole Client" Hired to Overhaul, Destroy New York’s Libraries?

For more about converging interests adverse to the tradition of libraries see:  Why Nonprofit Boards May Stray From Their Core Missions And Obligations To the Public- Considered Generally And Particularly With Respect To Libraries

Citizens Defending Libraries has focused a great deal on how real estate interests in New York City have driven the plundering sales of our great libraries, but there are some other significant questions to be asked about the other driving forces behind the dismantling of our libraries.

Noticing New York, with a new article, has broken new ground with revelations and questions that couldn’t be more urgent . . . .

. . .  Booz Allen Hamilton is regarded by experts as an “arm of the [United States] intelligence community.”  The U.S. spending trillions on the military-industrial-surveillance complex since 911 spends 70% of its surveillance budget through private contractors.  80% of that is spent on just five contractors, the “colossus” of which is Booz Allen Hamilton.

Booz Allen Hamilton was hired by the NYPL to overhaul its most important libraries in a scheme that entailed the sale and destruction of the Donnell, Mid-Mahattan and SIBL libraries and the central research stacks of the 42nd Street Central Research Library.

Noticing New York discusses how this and the loss of books and librarians relates to destruction of libraries throughout New York and asks questions such as:

If librarians were the first to successfully stand up and oppose the intelligence overreaching [of the PATRIOT Act] and if Booz Allen Hamilton "is really an arm of the intelligence community" involved with the federal government's "most controversial federal surveillance programs in recent years" then why was Booz Allen Hamilton hired to help reorganize the New York Public Library's most important libraries?

See:

Sunday, October 30, 2016- Snowden, Booz and the Dismantling of Libraries As We Know Them: Why Was A Private Government Spy Agency Hired to Take Apart New York's Most Important Libraries And Turn Them Into Something Else?

Booz Allen Hamilton was hired by the NYPL in 2007.  Just months before, May of 2006, was when the public learned that Connecticut librarians had been resisting the surveillance of library patrons by the FBI.  Before that the public didn’t and couldn’t know because the librarians were subject to a perpetual gag order about what they had been asked to do.