Posted on 07/12/2003 7:41:07 AM PDT by NYC Republican
William 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.
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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
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
2 posted on 3/6/02 7:30 AM Pacific by grammymoon:
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They all work for us and no one should become a millonaire off tax money, including HR perot.
You don't want anything known about you don't got into public service.
Public service should equal no privacy.
I agree with you even though I don't know exactly, but I can guess....
They're not at any great risk now. On the job injuries and deaths are much lower than pilots, electricians, contruction workers and I believe even handymen.
Funny your comment mirrors many of the cop's quotes on the subject. They say on one side of their mouth how conerned they are about the potential for violence, out of the other side they want real-world harm to come to a guy running a web site.
Poor babies.
Well, that is complete B.S., when considered with his earlier "Mr. Sheehan, ...who promises to expand his site to include every police and corrections officer in the state by the end of the year. ". No citizen needs personal home contact information to serve papers if they have been wronged by a cop. If they are wronged by a cop, the department should and would be served. This is not news to Mr. Sheehan, of course.
We hire police to deal with the very worst evil in our communities.... To give them a tool to seek revenge on the pretext of fighting some heroic battle for justice is irresponsible, and I can only hope he doesn't get someone killed.
I am in Washington state.
That's lunacy.... A cop's home life and family are not the public's property or the public's business... His job performance is.
I am not going to hire someone to deal with the very worst of our society and then fail to protect them as best I can. They owe us good work, we owe them our support and protection, and loyalty.
Police would love to have the fingerprints, DNA profile, tax returns, bank account balances and complete gun registration information on all law-abiding citizens at their fingertips at all times.
But we aren't supposed to know anything about them?
Mabye they should all wear black ski masks when on duty too.
That way their privacy would be completely protected.
|
U.S. Department of Labor
Occupational Fatalities per 100,000 Year 1999 |
|
|
Commercial Fishermen
|
162
|
|
Timber Cutters
|
154
|
|
Air Pilots
|
65
|
|
Construction Laborers
|
37
|
|
Garbage Collectors
|
34
|
|
Truck Drivers
|
28
|
|
Electricians
|
12
|
|
Gardeners (non farm)
|
11
|
|
Police
|
11
|
|
Carpenters
|
7
|
who are you talking about, speeders or public smokers?
I would tend to agree if the rules were the same all the way around, but they're not. OUR privacy is not protected from an entire slew of government officials including police. They make lists, watch our finincial transactions, credit card purchases, stop our cars at DUI roadblocks with dogs asking for papers, make us undress at airports, grope our women....and it's all legally sanctioned.
I guarantee that 99% of all cops will excuse or endore everything above. I've seen this mentality on this forum, it's a certain mindset that puts police in a special category who are entitled to take such liberties with our privacy.
I think this site is great, we're looking back at them. The internet makes the world small again, not much different than a small town say 100 years ago where your Sheriff was known by everyone.
You're right on. We need to do this with Federal bureaucrats. It is the only way to "encourage" them to not be abusive to the public. I am convinced that many of them use pseudonyms when dealing with the public. It's like all the swat teams that wear masks and do not display badges. You can never identify who broke up your house or killed your dog.
Have any of you ever noticed how few of the Fed's 3,500,000 employees you have ever met? That is not an accident. During my three score, I met one EPA guy and One IRS employee. They were both neighbors. We must identify and continually update information on these people. A monumental task, but feasible.
Thank God there is only one of you.
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