Awareness program 3

As early as 1973, the FBI was running a program aimed at securing information about reading habits of many library users; this program was ultimately called the “Library Awareness Program“. The Library Awareness Program was designed as a counterintelligence effort that would provide information to the FBI including the names and reading habits of users of many different libraries. The FBI was particularly interested in learning this type of information about foreign diplomats or their agents. It is clear that librarians and the public were unaware of this program until its existence was made public in an article published September 18, 1987 in the New York Times.

The FBI claimed that one of the major reasons this program was initiated was because hostile intelligence agents had been able to find some information that could be dangerous to the security of the United States. The area of greatest concern was the information at academic libraries that could be accessed through sophisticated databanks used for research. This point was illuminated by the report that a Soviet employee of the United Nations had been able to recruit a college student from Queens to obtain information at the library that was described as sensitive.

The Libraries in New York City that had been the subjects of the FBI visits contacted the New York Library Association about what had happened, they in turn contacted the American Library Association. This led to the opposition of the program by the NYLA, a long time New York Congressman, and the ALA and resulted in widespread outrage within the field. In October 1987 the ALA’s Intellectual Freedom Committee released a statement that explained the threat of this program, and urged libraries not to violate their ethical obligation to protect patrons’ rights by providing information to the FBI.

In 1988 congressional hearings were conducted on the subject. The purpose of these hearings may have been to find out what the FBI had been up to in regards to the Library Awareness Program, and if it was lawful. Following these hearings several FOIA requests were submitted to obtain more information on the subject. Eventually the FBI complied with one of the requests and released 37 pages of information about FBI activities related to the program. Through this release it was learned that the actual program name may have been Development of Counterintelligence Among Librarians, or DECAL.

After the congressional hearings in 1988, many institutions decided to adopt formal policies about what to do in the event that the FBI contacted the library. Most libraries have policies in case of such an event today. Librarians have tried to make it clear that they were not against helping the FBI in general, but rather that they opposed violating the rights of their patrons. Since that time many librarians have helped the FBI in a variety of projects that did not encroach on the patron’s rights. The issue has gathered a renewed concern since “9-11”, and the “Patriot Act”. Some people believe that the Patriot Act grants the government the right to inspect patron records without due cause in much the same way as the Library Awareness Program.

Today, many library patrons complain about the difference between passive surveillance of a patron’s information and the FBI’s active role in censoring online information and the free access to information.

In philosophy of self, self-awareness is the experience of one’s own personality or individuality. It is not to be confused with consciousness in the sense of qualia. While consciousness is being aware of one’s environment and body and lifestyle, self-awareness is the recognition of that awareness. Self-awareness is how an individual consciously knows and understands their own character, feelings, motives, and desires.

Neurobiological basis

There are questions regarding what part of the brain allows us to be self-aware and how we are biologically programmed to be self-aware. V.S. Ramachandran has speculated that mirror neurons may provide the neurological basis of human self-awareness. In an essay written for the Edge Foundation in 2009, Ramachandran gave the following explanation of his theory: “… I also speculated that these neurons can not only help simulate other people’s behavior but can be turned ‘inward’—as it were—to create second-order representations or meta-representations of your own earlier brain processes. This could be the neural basis of introspection, and of the reciprocity of self awareness and other awareness. There is obviously a chicken-or-egg question here as to which evolved first, but… The main point is that the two co-evolved, mutually enriching each other to create the mature representation of self that characterizes modern humans.”

Body

Bodily (self-)awareness is related to proprioception and visualization.

Health

In health and medicine, body awareness is a construct that refers to a person’s overall ability to direct their focus on various internal sensations accurately. Both proprioception and interoception allow individuals to be consciously aware of multiple sensations. Proprioception allows individuals and patients to focus on sensations in their muscles and joints, posture, and balance, while interoception is used to determine sensations of the internal organs, such as fluctuating heartbeat, respiration, lung pain, or satiety. Over-acute body-awareness, under-acute body-awareness, and distorted body-awareness are symptoms present in a variety of health disorders and conditions, such as obesity, anorexia nervosa, and chronic joint pain.For example, a distorted perception of satiety present in a patient suffering from anorexia nervosa.

Human development

Bodily self-awareness in human development refers to one’s awareness of their body as a physical object, with physical properties, that can interact with other objects. Tests have shown that at the age of only a few months old, toddlers are already aware of the relationship between the proprioceptive and visual information they receive. This is called first-person self-awareness.

At around 18 months old and later, children begin to develop reflective self-awareness, which is the next stage of bodily awareness and involves children recognizing themselves in reflections, mirrors, and pictures.  Children who have not obtained this stage of bodily self-awareness yet will tend to view reflections of themselves as other children and respond accordingly, as if they were looking at someone else face to face. In contrast, those who have reached this level of awareness will recognize that they see themselves, for instance seeing dirt on their face in the reflection and then touching their own face to wipe it off.

Slightly after toddlers become reflectively self-aware, they begin to develop the ability to recognize their bodies as physical objects in time and space that interact and impact other objects. For instance, a toddler placed on a blanket, when asked to hand someone the blanket, will recognize that they need to get off it to be able to lift it.  This is the final stage of body self-awareness and is called objective self-awareness.

Apes

Chimpanzees and other apes – species which have been studied extensively – compare the most to humans with the most convincing findings and straightforward evidence in the relativity of self-awareness in animals so far.

Dolphins

Dolphins were put to a similar test and achieved the same results. Diana Reiss, a psycho-biologist at the New York Aquarium discovered that bottlenose dolphins can recognize themselves in mirrors.

Magpies

Researchers also used the mark test or mirror test to study the magpie’s self-awareness. As a majority of birds are blind below the beak, Prior et al. marked the birds’ neck with three different colors: red, yellow, and black (as an imitation, as magpies are originally black). When placed in front of a mirror, the birds with the red and yellow spots began scratching at their necks, signaling the understanding of something different being on their bodies. During one trial with a mirror and a mark, three out of the five magpies showed a minimum of one example of self-directed behavior. The magpies explored the mirror by moving toward it and looking behind it. One of the magpies, Harvey, during several trials would pick up objects, pose, do some wing-flapping, all in front of the mirror with the objects in his beak. This represents a sense of self-awareness; knowing what is going on within himself and in the present. The authors suggest that self-recognition in birds and mammals may be a case of convergent evolution, where similar evolutionary pressures result in similar behaviors or traits, although they arrive at them via different routes.

A few slight occurrences of behavior towards the magpie’s own body happened in the trial with the black mark and the mirror. It is assumed in this study that the black mark may have been slightly visible on the black feathers. Prior et al. stated, “This is an indirect support for the interpretation that the behavior towards the mark region was elicited by seeing the own body in the mirror in conjunction with an unusual spot on the body.”

The behaviors of the magpies clearly contrasted with no mirror present. In the no-mirror trials, a non-reflective gray plate of the same size and in the same position as the mirror was swapped in. There were not any mark directed self-behaviors when the mark was present, in color, or in black  Prior’s et al.  data quantitatively matches the findings in chimpanzees. In summary of the mark test, the results show that magpies understand that a mirror image represents their own body; magpies show to have self-awareness.

The four stages in the mirror test

During the test, the experimenter looks for the animals to undergo four stages:

1. social response,
2. physical mirror inspection,
3. repetitive mirror testing behavior, and
4. the mark test, which involves the animals spontaneously touching a mark on their body which would have been difficult to see without the mirror.^[