What are you hiding Mr. Cheney?

As librarians we at times have to dance a line concerning patron privacy and reporting things on people. I have dealt less with this than many in public libraries I am sure. However, this story caught my eye and I post it here because there is some crossover.

Apparently the VP has been having the Secret Service destroy the records of who comes to visit him at his tax-payer funded home. My stance on this is "he must be hiding something or just release the logs". I mean if Cheney is meeting with people a VP is supposed to meet with then what's the big deal. I could understand maybe we don't need the world to know the ambassador from Syria has come by 10 times in 11 days (totally made up by me) because of national security but what is he hiding with logs at his home.

For that matter why is there a log, if he can have them erased it must not be a log or a reg so why keep them at all, unless he is doing something illegal which will make this a bigger story. I don't have a log at my house (but millions aren't being spent on upkeeping my home either) so why does he if he just wants it erased. This story confuses me, more so it worries me because we just don't know and not knowing is much more nerveracking than knowing most the time.

To add a law library spin to this I will admit that we protect patron records and don't tattle even when we might be supposed to. For instance if we have someone who is a habitual fine person and the bar asks us if we know any reason why they shouldn't be admitted we keep our mouthes closed. Lawyers are supposed to be good stewards of their clients money and racking up fines with a library shows you are a pretty crappy steward of other people's stuff but we let it slide even though many of use are also members of the bar and are "required" to be tattlers (so very few are though). I share this because I think our best defense is that it is apples and oranges, not returning books doesn't make someone a bad lawyer and a bad lawyer may return his books but most importantly if we start talking about patron's check out style's they lose confidence in us keeping thier ambiguity. If any librarians out there want to tell me how they handle this let me know.