Last word on Bozeman privacy fiasco

The City of Bozeman pri­vacy fiasco is over. Last week — after a media storm that brought a sledge­ham­mer of bad pub­lic­ity down on the city — Bozeman sus­pended its pol­icy of ask­ing job can­di­dates for Web user­names and pass­words on its back­ground check form. At its reg­u­lar meet­ing Monday, the city com­mis­sion for­mally ter­mi­nated the policy.

In an edi­to­r­ial on Thursday, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle praised the city for admit­ting its mis­take and cor­rect­ing it. “The pol­icy was a bad one, no doubt about it,” the news­pa­per wrote. “We get it, and our elected offi­cials get it. Now let’s move on. Certainly, there are more impor­tant issues fac­ing this community.”

I hang on that last sen­tence every time I read the edi­to­r­ial. More impor­tant issues fac­ing the Bozeman area? Sure:

• A block of down­town remains in ruins after a gas explo­sion in March. No one’s sure who to blame. Many down­town prop­erty own­ers were under­in­sured. People are crit­i­ciz­ing the gas company’s response. A hand­ful of peo­ple lost their homes. Bozeman’s down­town may never recover.
• Some res­i­dents are con­cerned about the appear­ance of gravel pits in the county, which have been used to sup­port the area’s — until recently — boom­ing growth. The pits degrade prop­erty val­ues and require rel­a­tively lit­tle gov­ern­ment oversight.
• The city bought a his­tor­i­cal man­sion for mil­lions of dol­lars and is spend­ing more money to restore it, cit­ing some vague plan for rent­ing it out for pri­vate and pub­lic events.
• The local hous­ing mar­ket is crash­ing and, along with it, the local con­struc­tion indus­try. The bubble-burst is reveal­ing just how hol­low the area’s econ­omy has been dur­ing the recent boom times.

Surely there are crime, agri­cul­tural, envi­ron­men­tal, wildlife and out­ly­ing com­mu­nity issues too, though I don’t know enough to men­tion them.

The fact that only two res­i­dents came to the city com­mis­sion meet­ing to speak about the pri­vacy fiasco might also be an indi­ca­tor of how (un)important the issue was to the city. Oh, and only one of those speak­ers stayed on topic, accord­ing to the Chronicle’s report.

What hap­pened? Thousands of peo­ple railed against the pol­icy from Wednesday night through Monday, yet only two peo­ple came out to speak?

It’s pos­si­ble the issue was over­hyped. But I don’t think you can put too much hype on an ille­gal pol­icy enacted by taxpayer-funded city employ­ees. Actions like that need to be exposed to the cold air of pub­lic opin­ion, enough cold air that the actions shrivel, turn brown and die.

No, hype was not the prob­lem. The prob­lem was that this was really only an issue for the peo­ple who use com­put­ers and social net­work­ing reg­u­larly. This was a Web issue. Regular cit­i­zens, who might not spend as much time online as the rest of us, weren’t as con­cerned. “Well, I don’t use those sites, so what do I care?” one of these peo­ple might say.

And it does seem like a small mat­ter, espe­cially to the offline crowd, until you real­ize that small vio­la­tions of our rights like this can lead to larger vio­la­tions later. The social net­work­ing pass­word thing stayed on that city form for sev­eral years before some­one found it inva­sive enough to men­tion it to the local news media. If the anony­mous tip­ster had decided not to send that e-mail, the pol­icy would still be in effect today.

And when the city can get away with putting an ille­gal pol­icy on one form — more­over, a pol­icy that most peo­ple don’t even know is ille­gal — then what will stop them from doing it again, from find­ing another way to invade cit­i­zens’ privacy?

Sure, this par­tic­u­lar pol­icy was enacted by peo­ple who were igno­rant of the big pic­ture, peo­ple unaware of how that par­tic­u­lar col­umn on a city form vio­lated law and abstracter prin­ci­ples that a lot of peo­ple think are vital to pri­vacy and liberty.

Sure, the city form was prob­a­bly writ­ten by peo­ple who thought they were doing the best thing for the com­mu­nity. I can under­stand. After all, they must have rea­soned, peo­ple can be very dif­fer­ent online than in per­son, and it would be good to get a glimpse of that online life to make sure the can­di­date is not secretly a mass mur­der­ing, gay-hating child moles­ter who hap­pens to post items depict­ing those lifestyle choices to their Facebook profile.

What’s that you say? That sort of infor­ma­tion is mostly password-protected? Well, let’s just ask for the pass­words. If they really want the job, they’ll give up the infor­ma­tion, right? Otherwise, they must have some­thing to hide, and that’s not the kind of per­son we want work­ing for Bozeman anyhow.

Privacy and rights vio­la­tions start inno­cently enough, but once you get away with some­thing, you often try to get away with it again, or get away with some­thing worse. That kind of esca­la­tion can be dan­ger­ous, espe­cially when it hap­pens in government.

The city now says that the pass­word field on the back­ground check form was not required. Yet the form doesn’t say which fields are optional and which ones are required. It makes no dis­tinc­tion. By that logic, all forms on the field are optional, and by exten­sion, the whole form is optional.

But of course, it’s not really optional, is it? Law requires that pub­lic employ­ees go through a back­ground check, so we must work our logic back­ward. If the check is required, then the form is required; and since no field on the form is indi­cated to be optional, then all fields must be required. Hence, the city was requir­ing peo­ple to give up their online passwords.

Even with­out the laws requir­ing back­ground checks, the form would still be required, at least in the mind of the appli­cant. If a poten­tial employer gives you a form to fill out and you don’t, that makes a state­ment, doesn’t it? In fact, with­hold­ing infor­ma­tion dur­ing a job inter­view process casts doubt on the appli­cant and decreases his chances for get­ting the job.

So Bozeman job appli­cants, prob­a­bly des­per­ate for a job in these harder than nor­mal times, filled out what­ever forms the city put in front of them, think­ing it bet­ter to com­ply than to be elim­i­nated from con­sid­er­a­tion. That seems like extor­tion to me, and it seems like some­thing we can’t just move on from.

In fact, I would ask the local media and the City of Bozeman itself to begin an in-depth review of every city doc­u­ment to ensure that the city isn’t ask­ing inap­pro­pri­ate ques­tions on any other forms. This sit­u­a­tion has shown us that with­out pub­lic over­sight, either by con­cerned cit­i­zens or the media or the blo­gos­phere, gov­ern­ments will step over the line, pur­pose­fully or not. We need to watch out. Let’s start now.