What's Next with the Orland Park Public Library Child Porn Scandal? .

ORLAND PARK, IL. (ECWd) –
The Orland Park Public Library has been fighting for seven months now to maintain its status quo, where child porn is accessible over the Library’s unsecured internet for pedophiles and predators who know where to find it. This horror was discovered back in October of last year, when internal incident reports completed by Library staffers and obtained through FOIA requests showed that child porn was accessed in the Library, but employees never called the police, never reported the act to the FBI, and the Board of Trustees never lifted a finger to make sure that this access point to child porn in the southwestern suburbs of Chicago was permanently closed.
In addition to the child porn being accessed in this library, the internal incident reports produced under FOIA pressure also showed instances of men openly masturbating in the Library, men accosting women and children sexually, and many other times when people using computers in this Library committed acts of disorderly conduct that warranted police involvement (yet, Library staff deliberately chose not to call the police!). An official investigation by the Orland Park Police Department that was conducted in November of 2013 determined that there were at least 22 instances of crimes committed in the Orland Park Public Library that Library staff did not handle properly, with most of these involving women and children accosted by men who had aroused themselves sexually in the Library using its anonymous, unfiltered Internet.
For point of reference, businesses like Starbucks or Kinko’s filter their Internet to block access to sites providing child porn (and instantly call the police if anyone is observed masturbating or accosting women or children in those businesses) but the Orland Park Public Library (OPPL) refuses to do this, citing the policy of the American Library Association (ALA) in keeping child porn accessible and “respecting patron privacy” (even when the “patron” in question is seen breaking the law by viewing, downloading, or distributing child porn!) .
The irony here is that though Village of Orland Park ordinance 8-6-1-1 requires Library staffers to call the police and report a crime when lewd and disturbing acts like open public masturbation occur in the Library, the Library staff chooses to look the other way and enable this criminal activity because the OPPL is run by a Director and Board who are true believers in the preachings of the American Library Association (which just happens to be a radical group funded largely by people like George Soros that sees its main purpose as “transforming communities by transforming libraries”).
The ALA says that child porn is “information” and all such “information” must be available to any person, of any age, with no filters on library computers. The Supreme Court of the United States, however, ruled in 2003 in the landmark case US vs. ALA that public libraries are allowed to use filtering software to prevent horrors like child porn from being accessed in public libraries. The Orland Park Public Library is, unfortunately, one of a minority of libraries in this country that listens to the ALA instead of the residents of its surrounding community: most libraries block child porn from being accessed, but the Orland Park Public Library’s Board of Trustees refuses to do this very simple thing to protect children from harm in this library and to shutdown an access point to child porn that attracts sex offenders. Because of the unsecured, anonymous internet available no-questions-asked in public libraries, criminals know these buildings are places they can evade law enforcement and do whatever they like with little chance of being caught.
The Orland Park Police Department has reported that known sex offenders in the area have been regularly spotted in the OPPL, using the Library’s computers as well as tablets and other mobile devices to anonymously log onto the Internet. These men are banned from using the internet or computers and the terms of most of their paroles state that they must not be within 500 feet of a school or other place where children congregate. Yet, they are allowed into the Orland Park Public Library by its Director, Mary Weimar, where these men can evade their parole officers and log onto the Library’s computers and internet any time they want. This particular Library chooses to use a program called Drive Shield every night to wipe every computer in the building clean (so that authorities can never go back and check what was accessed or downloaded in this public library). Criminals know this and use the Orland Park Public Library as a safe haven for their crimes.
Think of a public library as being a kind of extradition-free zone where cyber criminals of all stripes have automatic sanctuary: library staff will look the other way in places like the OPPL
The ALA has known for years that this has been happening and they encourage this sort of thing in libraries across the country. You should know that a woman named Judith Krug, the former head of the ALA’s Orwellian-sounding “Office of Intellectual Freedom” said after 9/11 that she hated that some libraries cooperated with the FBI after the terrorist attacks, when the feds were investigating if these libraries were used as access points for terrorist activity over the anonymous, unsecured internet there.
Judith Krug is the woman who encouraged libraries like the OPPL to invest in Drive Shield (to wipe computer records clean nightly so that terrorists and pedophiles can never be caught) but fight the installation of child porn filters (which would end the days of public libraries being used as access points for illegal material). Though deceased, the ghost of Judith Krug continues to haunt America’s libraries today. The OPPL certainly seems to need an exorcism to get rid of her influence.
In their prolonged battle to keep child porn accessible in the OPPL, the Board of Trustees has repeatedly violated both the Open Meetings Act and the Freedom of Information Act. The OMA violations have involved the Board: silencing critics by refusing public comment on topics critical of the Library (January 20th); violating its own rules and shoving public comment to the back of a meeting so most people will leave before Public Comment is allowed (January 20th); holding a surprise special meeting on a legal holiday to ram through a vote on keeping the child porn available when the public wasn’t looking (February 12th); refusing Public Comment altogether at an open meeting (February 12th); improperly voting to “ratify and affirm” agenda items for final action that were void ab initio (“from the beginning“) because they were originally voted on at an illegal meeting (March 17th); allowing a woman who was never legally appointed to the Board to vote at Board meetings (February 12th, February 17th, March 17th, April 21st, and May 19th); inventing new arbitrary and extemporaneous speaking rules meant to discourage public comment (April 21st); and holding a secret “strategy session” before their Open Meeting for the purpose of plotting ways to stage a disruption of their own meeting so that they could invent an excuse to call the police on their critics as revenge for all the recent complaints against them with the Public Access Counselor (May 19th).
Since October of 2013 (when it was first uncovered that child porn was accessed in the OPPL and the staff chose not to call the police and handle the situation properly), around 30 requests for review were filed by various members of the public against the OPPL with the PAC office for OMA and FOIA violations. The January and February Board meetings were determined to have been conducted improperly and the OPPL is facing several important determinations regarding the March, April, and May meetings in the weeks ahead. Some of the matters that the PAC is currently investigating (with decisions coming down soon) are:
* the illegal vote taken on February 12th to continue allowing child porn to be accessed in the OPPL = this vote is void ab initio because the February 12th meeting was held improperly on a legal holiday and, thus, everything done on that day is void; the OPPL created a huge mess for itself by ramming through a vote on seven controversial items and installing a new Board member on a day they were not allowed by law to hold a meeting.
* in a related matter, on March 17th the OPPL voted to “ratify and affirm” everything void ab initio that was done at the illegal February 12th meeting, but the OMA requires that recital and deliberation be performed at an Open Meeting before a vote can be taken on an agenda item; since everything the Board did on February 12th was done improperly and no proper recital and deliberation was performed for anything the Board voted to “ratify and affirm” on March 17th, that means that none of the controversial matters (including voting to keep child porn available) were properly handled.
* the PAC is expected to determine that a new vote must be taken on the policies that continue to allow child porn to be accessed at the OPPL, since the February 12th vote (at an illegal meeting) and the March 17th “vote to ratify and affirm” (without proper recital and deliberation) were both bungled
* part of the chaos the Board caused by holding that illegal special meeting on February 12th is the fact that one OPPL Board Member, Beth Gierach, has never been legally appointed or properly sworn-in…and yet the Board continues to seat her and allows her to vote month after month; this means all votes she took in February, March, April, and May should be voided since she was not a properly appointed Board member at the time of those votes.
The February 12th illegal meeting that the OPPL held was clearly a gambit this Board played to force a vote to continue allowing access to child porn and other evils in this Library on a day that was inconvenient to the public. Also, this Board was advised by the lawyers of Klein Thorpe Jenkins that if it held a vote on the child porn issue in a special meeting (not a regular board meeting) that the Board would not have to allow public comment at that meeting. The OPPL was advised in particular by Dennis G. Walsh of the KTJ firm that it could vote on February 12th and prohibit public comment, thereby giving Board members cover to vote to keep child porn accessible without the public being able to shame these cowards for voting the way that the ALA directed them to vote.
The OMA does not allow a Board to prevent public comment at any Open Meeting and all votes for final action must be made in Open Meetings. This means that no vote on any matter for final action can be taken at a meeting where public comment is not permitted.
The OMA also does not allow a vote for final action on an item to be taken if proper recital and deliberation is not performed for that agenda item…and, once again, recital and deliberation must be performed at a meeting that is open to the public (where public comment is allowed). This clearly means that a Board cannot on March 17th “ratify and affirm actions it took on February 12th when that February 12th meeting was not a properly held Open Meeting. Proper recital and deliberation needed to have been conducted at the March 17th meeting for any agenda items to have been voted on for final action…as everything done on February 12th was void ab initio,
What a head-spinning mess this Board has made in its increasingly more desperate attempt to keep child porn accessible in a gorgeous, spare-no-expense architectural gem of a library in an upscale Chicago suburb.
Behind the scenes, the real power play at issue here is that the American Library Association cannot afford to allow a plum like the OPPL to shut off the child porn access, since the ALA is based in Chicago and fears losing control of another public facility. Currently, the ALA in effect controls the OPPL, via the OPPL’s Director Mary Weimar (who is a committed acolyte of the ALA). If the OPPL Board of Trustees voted against the ALA and stopped allowing itself to be an access point to child pornography this would be a clear repudiation of the ALA’s “guidelines” for libraries…and would diminish the ALA’s clout.
The fear in the ALA’s offices is that if the OPPL votes to block the child porn then other libraries in Chicago could follow…and if that happens then the ALA’s entire house of cards could tumble.
This is why every effort imaginable is now being undertaken by the OPPL’s Board of Trustees to violate the OMA and FOIA in our State to thwart the public’s demand that child porn be permanently blocked in this Library.