In other ways, too, TeleRead would be anti-Big Brother. Americans would not have to make private companies privy to their reading habits. The national library could track dialups for the purpose of paying writers and publishers—you couldn’t retrieve books without reporting past accesses. But TeleRead would include protections. Records associated with individual users could be temporary, just a way to prevent information providers from abusing the system with repeated dialups. People could buy controversial books by way of anonymous digital money. In fact, with sophisticated enough fraud controls, the same techniques might eventually be used to prevent names from being associated with dialup records even for a short time. If nothing else, people could entrust TeleRead records to certified private companies that reported accesses without revealing identities. TeleRead, then, could provide even more safeguards than public library records in the paper era—significant, since librarians by habit had respected privacy much more than had other government officials. “There was a case back in Nixon’s era,” Phil Zimmermann would eventually remind me, “where Nixon tried to find out what some of his enemies were reading at the library, and the librarians were, of course, up in arms about being asked to supply a list of books that had been checked out by a particular person or a list of people that had checked out a particular book. They were able to resist the efforts by the government to obtain that information. I think that we need to have the same kind of controls in place for future libraries that are on the Net.” I couldn’t have agreed more. Even the hardware could serve to thwart Big Brother by promoting free expression and democracy. TeleRead would let people talk back to bureaucrats and among themselves; the machines would work with keyboards, and someday they might even serve in part as wireless digital telephones, not just computers. TeleRead would let Americans all be more uppity. The information in the national library would enrich public debate; it would at least somewhat blur distinctions between the wealthy and those who otherwise couldn’t afford top-quality information.