NY-TIMES - A Web Site Causes Unease in Police - http://www.JusticeFiles.org/

Look everyone non-art art


Computers and the Internet
Privacy
Police
Washington (State)

A Web Site Causes Unease in Police - http://www.JusticeFiles.org/
By ADAM LIPTAK

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.

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