Private Information And The Public Interest

In the 37 years since Connecticut enacted its Freedom of Information Act, many of our assumptions about both freedom and information have been transformed — by 9/11, by the Internet, and by our shifting attitudes about what we want from our democratic institutions. Over the years, the state’s “Sunshine Law” has been altered and amended in efforts to ensure that it continues to serve the public interest.

Just last week, the state’s House of Representatives was at it again, voting on an emergency fix of provisions in the act designed to protect the privacy and safety of police officers, prison guards, and other judicial system personnel. Those protections were having the unintended effect of barring the release of voter registration lists, land records, municipal grand lists, and motor vehicle registration lists, which many towns use in the preparation of tax bills.

The week before that, Newtown First Selectman Pat Llodra had a conversation with state FOI officials about instituting privacy protections for residents who provide their names, phone numbers and/or email addresses for the automatic notification systems many municipalities use during weather and other emergencies. She had already declined a request from a local resident seeking that data. That denial was not challenged under the provisions of the FOI Act, but Mrs Llodra suggested that both the FOI Commission and the Legislature address the issue to assure that the outcome of any possible future appeal would protect the privacy of residents in need of this service.

 The original Freedom of Information Act was crafted to enable citizens to keep an eye on their elected officials. By making information public, government was required to open its files and come out of the back rooms to conduct its business in the open. But times have changed, and the old information-is-power maxim has been joined by a new corollary truth: information is money. And the FOI Act is proving useful for those who wish not so much to keep an eye on government, but to keep an eye on the citizens themselves.

Last year, the Newtown Police Department joined dozens of other police departments in the state in using mobile license plate scanners to log the registration information and location of vehicles in public places. The technology is useful in identifying unregistered and stolen vehicles on the spot, but the data on the identity and whereabouts of thousands of cars not in violation of state law or involved in crimes is stored and available for later use.

“It’s like retroactive surveillance without probable cause,” a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) told The Hartford Courant last week. Through a freedom of information request, the ACLU was able to obtain the license plate database of ten towns in central Connecticut that had pooled their information; the trove included 3.1 million identification and location records on over 1.3 million different vehicles collected since October 2009. The Newtown Police Department is currently making plans to share its scanned license plate data with 14 other departments in southwestern Connecticut — and, apparently, anyone else who wishes to formally request the records.

The tug-of-war between unfettered information and privacy is not just playing out on social media websites. Information collected at our expense and ostensibly for our benefit is increasingly being used to examine our private lives for the benefit of others. The Legislature needs to act soon to close the growing gap between technology’s capacity for collecting and disseminating private information and the Freedom of Information Act’s ability to serve and protect the public interest.