At 11:12 PM -0400 5/18/01, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>----- Forwarded message from Declan McCullagh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -----
>
>The city of Kirkland, Washington has decided it doesn't want
>publicly-available information about its police officers to be, well,
>public. On May 14, Kirkland's lawyers sent me a letter ordering me to
>delete three Social Security numbers of Kirkland police officers from a
>Politech article from last week or risk a lawsuit.
This gets back to a topic often discussed on the list: when can there
be a lawsuit? Does a law have to be in violation or is it enough for
some party to simply feel "aggrieved"?
If the Kirkland folks can cite a law, has the law been tested constitutionally?
If it's a matter of the Kirkland folks feeling aggrieved about a
fully legal publication of some information legally obtained, Declan
could tell them to go pound sound and hope that a judge will dismiss
the lawsuit as "having no basis in law."
>
>I believe journalists and others generally should have the right to
>reprint information from public court documents, and attempts to
>curtail the First Amendment in the name of privacy go too far.
Indeed, trials are meant to be open and witnesses at trials have
always had the "right" (a misnomer, in the usual sense) to describe
what they saw.
The Founders would have been stunned to see proposals to make it
illegal to report the name and other public knowledge about a
constable, for example. It was the ability to confront one's accusers
and to have open trial proceedings that was one of the cornerstones
of the Bill of Rights.
The statists now in power seem to think (pace Feinstein, pace this
action, pace many other actions) that reporting the names and
identifying characteristics of state employees can be outlawed. So
much for "Congress shall make no law....free speech."
We have seen limited exceptions to the free speech clause in things
like obscenity cases, and, arguably, in national security cases
(though even "The Progressive" H-bomb case showed that the state may
not suppress articles on how to built weapons of mass destruction,
interestingly).
This may be the test case that goes all the way to the Supreme Court,
should all parties (Kirkland, Washington state, Declan, his editors,
his benefactors, etc.) push it.
"Well, as 'Kirkland v. McCullagh' showed in 2007, the government may
prosecute and imprison those who report the names of the officers who
arrest them."
or
"Well, as 'Kirkland v. McCullagh' showed in 2007, the government may
not restrict publication in any way of information legally obtained,
including home addresses of officers, numbers such as SS numbers
which may have been in the public record, or any other information
obtainable in a free society."
--Tim May
--
Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
