The Los Angeles Times
March 9, 2004
Give Them Your Name and Give Up Your Rights
By Brian Doherty
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-doherty9mar09,1,3240385
.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions
One man parked on the side of the road in Humboldt County, Nevada, in May
2000 was brave enough to say no to a police officer when ordered to identify
himself.
The officer "just walked up and started demanding my papers," Larry Hiibel
told Associated Press. "I was there on that road minding my own business."
He refused and, as a result, was arrested. Now Hiibel may end up redefining
our ability to move in public without having every aspect of our lives
investigated at the whim of the police.
Such a redefinition is sorely needed. Under current precedent, being ordered
to give your name to a police officer, if you are stopped under reasonable
suspicion of being involved in a crime, is generally considered a reasonable
and minimal intrusion on your privacy and dignity. When the Supreme Court
hears the case of Hiibel vs. 6th Judicial District Court, it must consider
how the practical consequences of identifying yourself to a police officer
have changed given the rise of a seemingly endless number of computerized
databases.
Police now potentially have at their disposal such databases as the National
Criminal Information Center (which the Justice Department exempted from
requirements that data in it be "timely, relevant, complete and accurate")
and the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (which the American
Civil Liberties Union thinks contains some of the data-mining aspects of the
controversial and supposedly scuttled Total Information Awareness program).
Demands that you identify yourself are creeping into situations well beyond
roadside encounters with police. The Department of Homeland Security is
rolling out its Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System II program,
which will check data on all airline passengers against existing government
and private databases to establish what threat level a traveler presents.
This will potentially involve checking your credit records, gun ownership,
magazine subscriptions, outstanding child-support obligations and any other
information about you floating in the "datasphere." It will also serve as a
means to capture anyone with an outstanding warrant for a violent crime;
once the system is in place and the data are collected, its uses can easily
expand. Overdue traffic ticket? Why don't we take care of that now?
As a recent General Accounting Office report on the program noted, the
Department of Homeland Security has not yet worked out a means of redress
for citizens detained or prevented from traveling based on the inevitable
faulty data that might make them seem suspicious.
We are entering a world in which our day-to-day activities as private
citizens leave us vulnerable to an officious police check on every bit of
information that any source, public or private, has gathered about us.
Not only the guilty have reason to fear. As the Electronic Privacy
Information Center wrote in its amicus brief in Hiibel's case, "a name is no
longer a simple identifier: It is the key to a vast, cross-referenced system
of public and private databases, which lay bare the most intimate features
of an individual's life. If any person can be coerced by the state to hand
over this key to the police, then the protections of the 4th and 5th
Amendments have been rendered illusory."
Nevada claims that merely stating your name would suffice under its statute.
But it also says in one of its court filings in the Hiibel case that "if the
person provides a false name, the officer may continue to detain the person
until the conflict is resolved." This certainly seems to imply an officially
authorized state-issued ID is all that will ultimately satisfy authorities.
Technological realities have transformed our world into a fishbowl. If we
are to live in that fishbowl, it's imperative that the government be
constrained in the circumstances under which it can stick a hook in us.
March 9, 2004
Give Them Your Name and Give Up Your Rights
By Brian Doherty
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-doherty9mar09,1,3240385
.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions
One man parked on the side of the road in Humboldt County, Nevada, in May
2000 was brave enough to say no to a police officer when ordered to identify
himself.
The officer "just walked up and started demanding my papers," Larry Hiibel
told Associated Press. "I was there on that road minding my own business."
He refused and, as a result, was arrested. Now Hiibel may end up redefining
our ability to move in public without having every aspect of our lives
investigated at the whim of the police.
Such a redefinition is sorely needed. Under current precedent, being ordered
to give your name to a police officer, if you are stopped under reasonable
suspicion of being involved in a crime, is generally considered a reasonable
and minimal intrusion on your privacy and dignity. When the Supreme Court
hears the case of Hiibel vs. 6th Judicial District Court, it must consider
how the practical consequences of identifying yourself to a police officer
have changed given the rise of a seemingly endless number of computerized
databases.
Police now potentially have at their disposal such databases as the National
Criminal Information Center (which the Justice Department exempted from
requirements that data in it be "timely, relevant, complete and accurate")
and the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (which the American
Civil Liberties Union thinks contains some of the data-mining aspects of the
controversial and supposedly scuttled Total Information Awareness program).
Demands that you identify yourself are creeping into situations well beyond
roadside encounters with police. The Department of Homeland Security is
rolling out its Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System II program,
which will check data on all airline passengers against existing government
and private databases to establish what threat level a traveler presents.
This will potentially involve checking your credit records, gun ownership,
magazine subscriptions, outstanding child-support obligations and any other
information about you floating in the "datasphere." It will also serve as a
means to capture anyone with an outstanding warrant for a violent crime;
once the system is in place and the data are collected, its uses can easily
expand. Overdue traffic ticket? Why don't we take care of that now?
As a recent General Accounting Office report on the program noted, the
Department of Homeland Security has not yet worked out a means of redress
for citizens detained or prevented from traveling based on the inevitable
faulty data that might make them seem suspicious.
We are entering a world in which our day-to-day activities as private
citizens leave us vulnerable to an officious police check on every bit of
information that any source, public or private, has gathered about us.
Not only the guilty have reason to fear. As the Electronic Privacy
Information Center wrote in its amicus brief in Hiibel's case, "a name is no
longer a simple identifier: It is the key to a vast, cross-referenced system
of public and private databases, which lay bare the most intimate features
of an individual's life. If any person can be coerced by the state to hand
over this key to the police, then the protections of the 4th and 5th
Amendments have been rendered illusory."
Nevada claims that merely stating your name would suffice under its statute.
But it also says in one of its court filings in the Hiibel case that "if the
person provides a false name, the officer may continue to detain the person
until the conflict is resolved." This certainly seems to imply an officially
authorized state-issued ID is all that will ultimately satisfy authorities.
Technological realities have transformed our world into a fishbowl. If we
are to live in that fishbowl, it's imperative that the government be
constrained in the circumstances under which it can stick a hook in us.
