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.
[...]
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Received on May 21 2001
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