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."
They only have to carry enough for those they choose to target for whatever nefarious reason. And believe me, I gave them reason enough when I wrote a "nasty-nice" letter to the editor nailing them for their misconduct in a traffic accident involving my son. I was on guard for forever, expecting them to target me or mine. I finally realized that they were more likely to go after those who are too ignorant or poor to fight back -- it also might have helped that I had a video of the accident scene that showed the evidence that the cop was wrong (a county cop happened to drive by while I was filming the scene, so they knew).
BTW, my son's former fiance had a cousin on the force and she was invited to the cops annual (and very secret) parties where the cops endulged in a wide varity of the drugs they had confiscated so these cops always have access to illicit drugs.
One last note, other than receiving an occasional speeding ticket, neither I, nor anyone in my family have ever been involved in criminal activity.
Sorry for the length, but I have not yet learned how to make a long story short.
Well there are exceptions. You didn't make it clear, but if you are/were a cop you're well aware of the fact that most can't shoot to save their life, literally.
No thank you on your challange, I don't use a "six shooter" so I'd lose the ten cases.
Sir first you should know that I have NOTHING but respect for you and your service ... two of my best friends are retired LEO's. That being said ... what has happened since the advent of the no-knock raid, the Ski Masked Ninja Cop and especially the amplified "them against us" attitude projected by an increasing of LEO's who seem more and more interested in being urban Rambos than police officers and governments using LEO's more and more as tax collectors ... what has happened is that the citizens of this country are losing their faith and trust in Law Enforcement.
The day used to be that the law abiding citizen was safe in the believe that if he stayed within the law ... or even tested some of the more beign borders of the law ... like having one or two drinks before driving a couple of blocks home ... he was safe in his knowledge that he would be ok. He believed that the cop was his friend and unless he was really a criminal he as a citizen would be treated with fairness and respect.
More and more it is become obvious that those days ... the days when you were a LEO ... are gone. We now live in an increasingly restrictive society leaning towards a police state. This restrictiveness is becoming more and more anathem to the concept of personal freedom AND responsibility and quite frankly ... more and more people are becoming fed up with it. When the common law abiding citizen has to worry whether they are going to be killed by a gang of Ninja clad wannabes in some wrong address no-knock raid ... they resent it. When the government thinks that it is the mother to all it's citizens and replaces the citizens judgement with it's own (it's for their own good you know) ... that's a form of tyranny ... and the normal citizen resents it. When a cop uses the color of authority and exacts revenge against a citizen over a private matter ... that is a heinous crime ... BUT when the cop gets away with it as easily as the one in this thread does ... it is veiwed as a travesty and the normal citizen becomes outraged.
Finally ... when this same senario becomes more and more commonplace as it has been lately ... the normal citizen starts to realize that things have GONE WAY TO FAR and that if he wants to keep his status as a citizen and not a subject ... he has got to take action and do something.
It is then that the normal citizen begins to realize that any cop that would participate in the tyranny and subjegation of the citizenry IS NOT doing the job we as the citizens of this country hired him to do ... and HAS thru THEIR actions become the enemy ....
It is at this point Joe Citizen realizes that the Ninja cop may be right ... it HAS become them against us ... and the first volley fired in that struggle is the posting of LEO addresses ... by normal law abiding citizens.
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