There is no right to privacy in the Constitution, abortion foes like to remind us. To them, it’s a constitutional stretch to say that a woman has the right to make up her mind about her body, all by herself, without government assistance.
But there will be more privacy than you can shake a very big stick at in Florida if a state lawmaker gets his way. Personnel records of public workers, such as teachers and elections officials, as well as arrest records, civil suits, and just about everything else formerly “public” will forever more be “private.”
The bill requires that personal identification information should always remain private, even when collected legally.
It would give people the option of choosing whether to have personal identification information released to the public when requested by a state agency to supply such information.
Personal identification information is defined as a person’s name and any information that may be used to identify an individual, including an address, telephone number, social security number, date of birth or mother’s maiden name.
The bill is one of the three labeled most egregious by the First Amendment Foundation, a Florida open-government advocacy group made up of newspaper reporters, broadcasters, and other members of the press. The same state representative, William Proctor (R-St. Augustine), made the list twice.
His second (HB 1211) would make it a misdemeanor to distribute personal identification information about someone without first receiving permission from that person, even if the distributors legally acquired the information from public records.
The framers of the Constitution, as we all know but apparently need to be reminded, wanted us to be able to keep a very close eye on the courts, since they alone have the power to deprive us of our liberty. Without knowing who’s been arrested or tried for what by whom, we can’t possibly exercise the oversight a free society requires.
“It would just close the door to a whole host of records that we use regularly to oversee our government,” said Adria Harper, the director of the Florida’s First Amendment Foundation.
In an extreme case, Harper said, a newspaper could be prevented from printing the name of a killer unless the killer gave permission for the personal information to be disclosed.
These same Republicans want us to know the addresses, license numbers, and blood types of sex offenders. How these two initiatives will coexist is an interesting question. Proctor’s explanation of what he is trying to accomplish is, at best, lame.
“The basic question is to what level of privacy is a person entitled,” Proctor said. “There is the problem of identity theft. That’s not a small problem.”
It is and it isn’t. Identity theft, like online child pornography, is being pumped up and used as a rallying cry to either unconstitutionally hide us or unconstitutionally snoop on us. Either way, it’s bad law.
