[Politech] Reason magazine on Supreme Court Hiibel case

From: Declan McCullagh (declan@private)
Date: Tue Mar 23 2004 - 21:48:50 PST

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    -------- Original Message --------
    Subject: RE: [Politech] Supreme Court hears arguments in Hiibel 
    anonymity case[priv]
    Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 07:24:55 -0500
    From: Nick Gillespie <gillespie@private>
    To: Declan McCullagh <declan@private>
    
    Declan,
    
    I thought the Politech list might be interested in this recent op-ed on the
    Hiibel case by Reason's Brian Doherty. It originally ran in the LA Times
    and was picked up by a bunch of other papers.
    
    Nick
    
    **************
    Nick Gillespie
    Editor-in-Chief
    REASON
    www.reason.com
    **************
    
    
    http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-doherty9mar09,1,324038
    5.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions
    COMMENTARY
    Give Them Your Name and Give Up Your Rights
    By Brian Doherty
    Brian Doherty is a senior editor at Reason magazine.
    
    March 9, 2004
    
    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.
    
    
    
    **************
    Nick Gillespie
    Editor-in-Chief
    REASON
    www.reason.com
    c/o 509 Glenview Drive
    Oxford, OH 45056
    P: 513.523.6505
    C: 513.255.5151
    F: 513.523.5443
    E: gillespie@private
    **************
    Read why Folio mag "adores" REASON at
    http://foliomag.com/ar/marketing_small_magazines_adore_11/index.htm
    
    
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