Local News : Sunday, July 08, 2001

By Michael Ko
Seattle Times Eastside bureau

Everything he does is legal. The information is available - to anyone who wants it - at courthouses, through Freedom of Information Act requests from government agencies and on Internet- search engines.

If you are uneasy about what people like Sheehan can uncover - what if he posted it without your permission on the Internet? - ask yourself this: How responsible is Sheehan, and how responsible are the sources who made the information available to him in the first place?

Sheehan wants the courts to begin answering that question.

Sheehan is being sued by Kirkland for listing personal information about the city's police officers - including home phone numbers, addresses and, at one time, Social Security numbers - on his private Web site.

This week, Sheehan's lawyer is serving several Internet-information providers, including Yahoo!, Infospace, Data-Trac.com and U.S. Search, as potential "third party" defendants or defendants who must share responsibility.

He wants these companies to appear in court to argue their level of culpability, if any. And Sheehan has that right under the law.

The arguments that could be heard before King County Superior Judge Robert Alsdorf in the coming months are at the frontier of Internet laws with respect to privacy and the First Amendment. Specifically, who is responsible when sensitive information is taken from one Internet site, posted on another and then misused?

Alsdorf ruled in May that Sheehan's site was protected, albeit distasteful, political speech. The officers, who contend the information makes them vulnerable to harassment, identity theft and even physical retaliation from their enemies, filed a motion in Superior Court late last month seeking $609,000 in damages from Sheehan.

Elena Garella, Sheehan's Seattle lawyer, estimates her client obtained at least two-thirds of his content from Internet sites. The other third, she said, came from government agencies, such as tax assessor's and voter-registration files, which are public records.

The city acknowledges that the information might be public but says the danger is in computerizing, itemizing and distributing the information in a single source.

Garella's contention is that Sheehan, as a private citizen, has a greater right under the First Amendment to collect and publish his information than the Internet companies who collect and publish the same information for commercial purposes.

The third-party action is also a practical protection for her client, in case a judgment is ordered against him for damages.

"This is the first time we've had a major case based on information obtained and then disclosed on the Internet," Garella says.

"We're putting the court on notice that this activity is going on, and they can't stop Bill Sheehan from doing what other people are doing for money."

Internet-law experts acknowledge Sheehan's right to free speech, but they say there are significant obstacles to his logic.

"When you associate bits and bits and bits of seemingly innocent information and then broadcast them, there is a legitimate judicial concern for an individual's privacy," said Harvey Jacobs, managing director of Jacobs and Associates in Washington, D.C., who specializes in Internet law.

"Once you get a critical mass of data, you may get such an accurate picture of a person that you're invading his rights to privacy. It's sci-fi, but the technology does exist."

Courts have, on numerous occasions, ruled on the value of an identity. Likenesses, names and personas have strong protections. Think celebrities.

"It's going a little far to say the originators are liable," Jacobs said. "That would theoretically open up the Yellow Pages people. Yahoo! or Infospace, they clearly have a right to do what they're doing. Once you start to assimilate the data, that's potentially where you cross the line."

Bart Lazar, an Internet-privacy attorney in Chicago, agrees.

"There are limits to the First Amendment when your conduct is contrary to the public interest," Lazar said. "The courts could find that there may well be a public interest to protect our police officers."

Sheehan, a Bothell network engineer, and his associate, Aaron Rosenstein of Seattle, said they built the Web site to hold police officers accountable for their actions.

To that end, they obtained rosters of local police agencies and filled in specifics by tapping into companies such as Data-Trac.com and U.S. Search, enormous information clearinghouses that are swelling every day as more and more knowledge becomes available online.

Companies like these have varying rules about what kind of information they provide, how they provide it and who they provide it to, but their premise is the same: They are portals between users and databases worldwide, including phone books, criminal records, bankruptcy judgments, post-office-box profiles and property records.

Businesses like these offer to find long-lost friends, track down ex-spouses for the purpose of pursuing child-support payments or complete employee-background checks.

Ken Chong, director of marketing at U.S. Search, based in Los Angeles, says his company "accesses publicly available information electronically for you - hundreds of databases, millions of records - that any individual can access themselves."

"But it's a lengthy and time-consuming process," Chong said. "So what we do is we provide the network."

Companies such as Yahoo! and Infospace are different, offering a broader range of Internet services. But they feature extensive people-finding options, which Sheehan says he used often. That is why they are included in the motion.

Chong and an Infospace spokesman declined to comment on their companies' legal situation. Representatives of the other companies did not return calls.

These companies obtain much of their information from "self-reported" sources, in addition to myriad public records. It's the same information that people - knowingly and unknowingly - give to insurance companies, write on magazine subscriptions or type on Internet registration sites.

It's a valuable commodity that is bought and sold by banks, credit agencies and telemarketers.

"Read your home-loan application," Sheehan says. "It gives them the right to sell certain information, share it with third parties or their subsidiaries. It's everybody that you sign an application with, that you spend money with. I had to tell my pet insurance not to disclose any of my information.

"To say that I'm putting this information out there, and it's wrong, is ridiculous."

Some guidelines exist for how these commercial-information providers should handle their content. The industry, sensitive to these kinds of concerns, is trying to create its own privacy standards.

And federal rules are very strict about the information that can be sold or released to creditors and employers.

Many companies also protect themselves from liability with "permissible-use" notices - "I agree not to use this information to harm, physically or emotionally, the person for which I am searching," reads the one from U.S. Search - and other self-imposed rules such as not releasing information on minors or celebrities.

Ultimately, there is no overall regulation procedure in place. The problem becomes that once the information is out there, it's out there. Garella likens it to toothpaste having spilled out of the tube.

Even Chong concedes: "We work hard to alleviate any illegal usage ... but we don't have control over what people do with the information. We can't follow them home."

Michael Ko can be reached at 206- 515-5653 or mko@seattletimes.com.

Copyright © 2001 The Seattle Times Company