WASHINGTON – Attorney General John Ashcroft denounced as “hysteria” the contention by some librarians and civil liberties groups that the FBI can use a new anti-terror law to snoop into Americans’ reading habits.

In a speech Monday to an American Restaurant Association conference, Ashcroft said people are being wrongly led to believe that libraries have been “surrounded by the FBI,” with agents “dressed in raincoats, dark suits and sunglasses. They stop everyone and interrogate everyone like Joe Friday.

“Now, you may have thought with all this hysteria and hyperbole, something had to be wrong,” Ashcroft said. “Do we at the Justice Department really care what you are reading? No.”

A portion of the Patriot Act, passed shortly after the 2001 terror attacks, gives federal authorities access to library, bookstore and other business records as part of terrorism investigations. Some libraries have begun purging their records more frequently and posting signs warning that the records could be checked by the FBI.

The provision has drawn a legal challenge in a federal lawsuit filed in July by the American Civil Liberties Union and Islamic groups.

Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the American Library Association’s Washington office, said library records should be treated differently from those of other businesses because of privacy rights and constitutional free speech protections.

The Justice Department should at least be required to publicly describe how often FBI agents subpoena library records, she said. That information is classified but is reported secretly to Congress twice a year.

“They are not taking this issue seriously, and the American people are upset about this,” Sheketoff said. “At least they could give us some idea of the breadth of the problem.”

Ashcroft said, however, that subpoenas of library records are closely scrutinized by federal judges, and the FBI, with 11,000 agents, could never begin to monitor the reading habits of millions of library patrons even if it wanted to.