If you want to find a group of people who are full of their own imagined importance, it'd be tough to beat the American Library Association, in high dudgeon over the Patriot Act's provisions to allow the FBI or other agencies to subpeona library borrowing records. Nat Hentoff, the renowned Village Voice columnist and First Amendment absolutist writes on this here. (It's worth clicking on the link just to see the picture of one Marie Bryan, striking what she hopes is a heroic pose amidst the bookracks. She instead looks like she's spying on someone, which in my experience is not an unknown habit in the profession.)
The ALA (and booksellers, as in the Lewinsky case) seems to take the tack that it is some sacred knighthood guarding the public's right to access information, the fight against censorship, etc.
This is plainly not the case. I'll not quarrel with private bookstores choosing to stock the books that they do; but public libraries are notorious for slanting their purchases and sticking inconvenient arguments into some of the dustier corners of the Dewey Decimal System.
But that's neither here nor there. Ms. Bryan and her comrades don't enjoy priest/penitent or doctor/patient confidentiality. They deal with public documents and if they are germane to police or prosecutors' investigations, then they must be turned over.
If Ms. Bryan disagrees, she's free to take her chances in court, but the feds don't need the shiny new Patriot Act to put her away -- a good old-fashioned obstruction of justice rap will suffice.
However, as Hentoff goes on to note, the ALA is curiously insouciant when it comes to countries where librarians are in serious danger when they dare to disagree with the government:
A member of the ALA's policy-making governing council, Mark Rosenzweig, says patronizingly that "we cannot presume that all countries are capable of the same level of intellectual freedom that we have in the U.S. Cuba is caught in an extremely sharp conflict with the U.S. . . . I don't think [Cuba] is a dictatorship. It's a republic."