Forwarded by the author. It'll be interesting to see what effect today's decision by the Supreme Court in Bartnicki v. Vopper will have on Kirkland's pursuit of justicefiles.org and their threats against Politech: http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/99-1687.ZS.html Background on Kirkland: http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=kirkland -Declan --- http://www.sierratimes.com/archive/files/may/20/arsierratimes.htm Doing Something, Not Just Talking About It! Sierra Times Exclusive Report 05.20.01 When it comes to public facts, some animals are more equal than others It's now 2001, not 1961; this isn't Mayberry, R.F.D., and relatively few people remember that even Officer Barney Fife got respect when he said "Come along, now." Patrolling the streets now are police who have been trained in paramilitary tactics and carry weapons provided by the Department of Defense. Rather than being an integrated part of the community, law enforcement has migrated to the model of military "peacekeeping" seen in Serbia. Instead of being integrated into and accountable to the communities in which they operate, police forces are assuming many of the characteristics of an occupational army. A lot of people all over the political spectrum have grumbled about the dramatic change, but like the weather, nobody has done anything about it. Except Bill Sheehan. Sheehan, a network engineer and libertarian who resides in a suburb of Seattle, sought the names, title, and salaries of law enforcement personnel at a number of Seattle-area agencies under the state of Washington's Open Records Act, and has republished the information on the web. Sheehan cross-matched the data he obtained to publicly available records to obtain the home addresses and social security numbers. To find addresses, he used common internet search engines such as Yahoo people search. Social Security numbers were obtained from one of the many services that freely sell such information for as little as a buck. Sheehan also linked an embarrassing number of officers to their bankruptcy and criminal records. It's all legally public available information. So why is Sheehan being sued multiple times to take down his web site? Simple: those filing the lawsuits believe that public information should be treated as private when it comes to law enforcement. In their lawsuit against Sheehan, the city of Kirkland, Washington, maintained that listing social security numbers, home phone numbers and addresses would lead to harassment of officers and identity theft. Elena Garella, Sheehan's attorney, pointedly remarked that "anyone who tries to steal the identity of a police officer would have to be incredibly stupid." Sheehan's effort to increase police accountability through publishing the names of law enforcement personnel started 18 months ago when he learned how to use Open Records Act requests. In April and May, 2000, he filed requests with a number of cities in King County, and with the King County sheriff's department, asking for public information. All of the cities except Pacific initially provided the requested information, but the King County Sheriff's Office and the King County Jail refused. The Act requires that a public agency release such information within 5 working days. The city of Pacific claims that they are waiting for a decision in the King County case. King County did respond by filing suit against Sheehan on May 13, 2000, although they did not serve him until the following July. The case was heard by King County Court Judge Michael J. Fox in November of last year. Fox ordered the county to turn over the last names of the officers. King County refused, and has appealed the decision. That appeal is pending. However, King County has seriously hurt their case by failing to file for a stay in time. Should King County lose the appeal, the county can be held liable for $100/day penalty for withholding the information. "For all intents and purposes," Sheehan says, "it means that they are in contempt of court." An early Fourth of July But the real fireworks show started on March 17, 2001, when Sheehan went live with his web site. Almost instantly, Justicefiles was hit by a barrage of hacking attempts and denial of service attacks. Sheehan and his partner, Aaron Rosenstein, both experienced network engineers, easily managed to keep the attacks from overwhelming their server. It was somewhat harder to defeat the pressure on their ISP, who received many calls from people asking that the site be taken down. The ISP did stand by justicefiles, however Sheehan is looking for another provider who can handle higher traffic loads. The site did temporarily go down when the domain registrar, DomainDiscover, caved in to pressure and unregistered his sites. Sheehan immediately reregistered the sites with domainbank.com and the site was back up within a day. Some denial of service attacks were traced to the King County computer system. Evidence of the attacks was turned over to the FBI, which appears to be actively pursuing the case. [...] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if it remains intact. To subscribe, visit http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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