Posted on 07/11/2003 8:09:36 PM PDT by jern
Dispute Simmers Over Web Site Posting Personal Data on Police By ADAM LIPTAK
illiam Sheehan does not like the police. He expresses his views about what he calls police corruption in Washington State on his Web site, where he also posts lists of police officers' addresses, home phone numbers and Social Security numbers.
State officials say those postings expose officers and their families to danger and invite identity theft. But neither litigation nor legislation has stopped Mr. Sheehan, who promises to expand his site to include every police and corrections officer in the state by the end of the year.
Mr. Sheehan says he obtains the information lawfully, from voter registration, property, motor vehicle and other official records. But his provocative use of personal data raises questions about how the law should address the dissemination of accurate, publicly available information that is selected and made accessible in a way that may facilitate the invasion of privacy, computer crime, even violence.
Larry Erickson, executive director of the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, says the organization's members are disturbed by Mr. Sheehan's site.
"Police officers go out at night," Mr. Erickson said, "they make people mad, and they leave their families behind."
The law generally draws no distinction between information that is nominally public but hard to obtain and information that can be fetched with an Internet search engine and a few keystrokes. The dispute over Mr. Sheehan's site is similar to a debate that has been heatedly taken up around the nation, about whether court records that are public in paper form should be freely available on the Internet.
In 1989, in a case not involving computer technology, the Supreme Court did allow the government to refuse journalists' Freedom of Information Act request for paper copies of information it had compiled from arrest and conviction records available in scattered public files. The court cited the "practical obscurity" of the original records.
But once accurate information is in private hands like Mr. Sheehan's, the courts have been extremely reluctant to interfere with its dissemination.
Mr. Sheehan, a 41-year-old computer engineer in Mill Creek, Wash., near Seattle, says his postings hold the police accountable, by facilitating picketing, the serving of legal papers and research into officers' criminal histories. His site collects news articles and court papers about what he describes as inadequate and insincere police investigations, and about police officers who have themselves run afoul of the law.
His low opinion of the police has its roots, Mr. Sheehan says, in a 1998 dispute with the Police Department of Kirkland, Wash., over whether he lied in providing an alibi for a friend charged with domestic violence. Mr. Sheehan was found guilty of making a false statement and harassing a police officer and was sentenced to six months in jail, but served no time: the convictions were overturned.
He started his Web site in the spring of 2001. There are other sites focused on accusations of police abuse, he said, "but they stop short of listing addresses."
Yet if his site goes farther than others, Mr. Sheehan says, still it is not too far. "There is not a single incident," he said, "where a police officer has been harassed as a result of police-officer information being on the Internet."
Last year, in response to a complaint by the Kirkland police about Mr. Sheehan's site, the Washington Legislature enacted a law prohibiting the dissemination of the home addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and Social Security numbers of law enforcement, corrections and court personnel if it was meant "to harm or intimidate."
As a result, Mr. Sheehan, who had taken delight in bringing his project to the attention of local police departments, removed those pieces of information from his site. But he put them back in May, when a federal judge, deciding on a challenge brought by Mr. Sheehan himself, struck down the law as unconstitutional.
The ruling, by John C. Coughenour, chief judge of the Federal District Court in Seattle, said Mr. Sheehan's site was "analytically indistinguishable from a newspaper."
"There is cause for concern," Judge Coughenour wrote, "when the Legislature enacts a statute proscribing a type of political speech in a concerted effort to silence particular speakers."
The state government, he continued, "boldly asserts the broad right to outlaw any speech whether it be anti-Semitic, anti-choice, radical religious, or critical of police so long as a jury of one's peers concludes that the speaker subjectively intends to intimidate others with that speech."
Bruce E. H. Johnson, a Seattle lawyer specializing in First Amendment issues, said Judge Coughenour was correct in striking down the statute because it treated identical publicly available information differently depending on the authorities' perception of the intent of the person who disseminated it.
"It forces local prosecutors to become thought police," Mr. Johnson said.
Elena Garella, Mr. Sheehan's lawyer, said there was one principle at the heart of the case.
"Once the cat is out of the bag," she said, "the government has no business censoring information or punishing people who disseminate it."
Fred Olson, a spokesman for the state attorney general, Christine O. Gregoire, said the state would not appeal Judge Coughenour's decision.
"Our attorneys reviewed the decision and the case law," Mr. Olson said, "and they just felt there was very, very little likelihood that we would prevail on appeal. Our resources are much better used to find a legislative solution."
But Bill Finkbeiner, a state senator who was the main sponsor of the law that was struck down, said the judge's opinion left little room for a legislative repair. He said he was frustrated.
"This isn't just bad for police officers and corrections employees," Mr. Finkbeiner said. "It really doesn't bode well for anybody. Access to personal information changes when that information is put in electronic form."
Mr. Sheehan says one sort of data he has posted has given him pause.
"I'll be honest and say I do have a quandary over the Social Security numbers," he said. "I'm going to publish them because that's how I got the rest of my information, and I want to let people verify my data. But our state government shouldn't be releasing that data."
Lt. Rex Caldwell, a spokesman for the Police Department in Kirkland, said his colleagues there were resigned to Mr. Sheehan's site, and added that much of the information posted on it was out of date.
When the matter first came up, "people were extremely unhappy about it," Lieutenant Caldwell said. "Now it's more of an annoyance than anything else. The official line from the chief is that we're still concerned. At the same time, everyone's greatest fear, of people using this to track them down, has not materialized."
Nor is there any indication that the site has led to identity theft, he said.
Brightening, Lieutenant Caldwell said some officers even welcomed the posting of their home addresses, if that encouraged Mr. Sheehan to visit.
"If he wants to drop by the house," Lieutenant Caldwell said, "the police officers would be more than happy to welcome him. We're all armed and trained."
Well, funny you mention that. The government collects all kinds of information on us (and wants to collect even more). The problem is, we can't see what they are collecting on us. They won't let us. They have all of this information on us, even those of us who are guilty of nothing, and they won't say why the collect it or what it is being used for.
Sure, every now and then we get a glimpse behind the curtain, and we see that they want to track what we buy, they want to track those who buy firearms and ammo, they want to track where we travel to and from.
What this man has posted on his website about cops is nothing compared to what the government has on us.
For the most part, the average American citizen does not realize just how much information the government has collected on them, or just who has access to that information.
Every person in the courtroom knows that all guns and all marijuana baggies are not sticking out from under the passenger's seat or the glove box, but the prosecutor routinely puts on this perjured testimony, the judge regularly pretends to believe it, and the evidence seized as supposedly in plain view but actually obtained from an illegal search is not suppressed. The whole farce goes on in thousands of courtrooms every day across the land. Our police are professional liars because if they weren't, they couldn't make enough cases to obtain federal aid money based upon the number of drug and gun busts made by each department each year. Those are the facts: like them or not.
You gotta admit, many are fat stupid and socially inept though. Those are the ones that are causing the rest of you guys trouble.
It's too bad the rest of you pay, but we don't soon forget when an officer of the law drags us around unjustly. Makes us want to return the favor.
Maybe we should pay them more or something, I dunno, I think it's a quality issue. It seems as though ya'll have no interest in policing yourselves from the attitude I see.
And the government posts that information on you for all to see?
So... Do you believe these officers are personally responsible for everything the state does??
Thank you barrister for the shysters view point.
Oh I know the cops don't make the laws, but they are an extension of the government, whether it's your local deputy or an FBI agent. I don't lump them in a special category.
I think it would be better, if not only information was collected about the cops, but about all government officials. They are certainly collecting it about us.
Ahh, James Dalton Bell or C. J. "Toto" Parker found out the hard way that the feds don't take kindly to that.
From sierratimes
[...]
"So what the government was left with was prosecuting a thought crime: intent. Because Bell had used his freedom of political speech to write such items as Assassination Politics and disclose IRS agents home addresses, he obviously had to have the intent to harass federal agents. And the harassment was loosely construed. Any attempt to find or disclose any personal information about an agent can be made to fit federal law against intention to harass or injure an agent."
"Several times during the trial, the prosecutor made it clear that such an investigation was inappropriate and illegal merely on the basis that the subjects of such investigation were federal agents. Numerous times he cited the special privilege that agents hold that ordinary citizens dont possess. Federal agents are, indeed, a breed apart and must be specially protected, he insisted. While they could surveil and investigate ordinary citizens, it was illegal for ordinary citizens to do the same to them."
[...]
"The law that made stalking federal agents a crime will continue to be used with increasing frequency. The law, enacted in 1996 and amended in 2000, has already been upheld in the Fourth and Eighth Federal District. Stalking itself is defined based on the slippery slope of intention, not on action, which brings up the specter of an increasing number of Stalinesque thought-crime trials in the future."
Do a web search on either name for the full story, several years ago this was a daily topic on the cypherpunk listserve.
Since they've brought out their big guns, a self professed defense attorney, and Fred's remind me to tell you story (wink, wink), there's just no way I can hang around to defend the jackbooted thugs against such intellectual firepower.
Either that or I'm just going to bed...but if it might make them feel more imposing to run me off.
Hang in there, as you said...fortunately there are very few like them in the real world.
No, they don't .. protection implies prevention. Criminals aren't scared of the cops anymore. Criminals DO FEAR a well armed populace.
Cops are criminal historians. Of course they could concentrate on nailing murders rather than speeders and stupid seatbelt or fireworks laws.
That's the crux of the matter - we don't know what they collect on us, or who sees that info or what they do with it. For all we know many many people may have access to that information. You or I don't know because the government doesn't feel that we have the right to know who knows what about us.
I'll throw out a specific example about some of the ways the government (at various levels) wants to use the information it collects on you. Let's say you live in Florida. You purchase a firearm. That information ends up in a database. You move to Chicago. They may decide they want to check up and see who is living in the city limits that may have firearms. Guess what, your name pops up when they comb through various databases. They may have a ban on the type of firearm you legally purchased in Florida, or pass a ban, or they just may want to know a bit about you or why you own a firearm. You'll get a visit from the police or if you are stopped for some reason, your name might be flagged, and you'll get a little extra questioning.
Think it's farfetched? It's not. The TIA started out as a way to compile lots of data on everybody and to make it available to those agencies that request that info. They may change the name to "Terrorist" instead of "Total", but I doubt little else has changed.
I may sound tin-foilish, but I work in the IT industry, I'm fully aware of what current databases and computer systems/servers are capable of. I keep up on security and privacy matters. They may spread the contracts around to various universities or companies, but when you look at it as a whole, they want to know all they can about you or I, regardless of the fact that we have done nothing to warrant their inquiries.
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