UPDATED City of Bozeman asks for online passwords for job applicant background checks

By Michael Becker | Published: June 18, 2009
This entry is part 1 of 18 in the series Bozeman Privacy Fiasco

A story from local CBS affil­i­ate KBZK is gen­er­at­ing a lit­tle ire this morn­ing. It seems a con­cerned and anony­mous e-mailer pointed out to the news sta­tion that the City of Bozeman, on its crim­i­nal back­ground search con­sent form, asks appli­cants to list their per­sonal and busi­ness Web sites, Web pages and any mem­ber­ships to online social groups or chat rooms. This includes pro­vid­ing the city with user­names and pass­words, pre­sum­ably so city employ­ees can log in and check to make sure you’re morally acceptable.

The story aired at 10 p.m. It may have aired at 5:30 p.m. too, but I wasn’t watch­ing the new then. The point it, it’s spread­ing a bit on Twitter this morn­ing and it was linked on Boing Boing last night.

UPDATE: Slashdot, Read/Write Web, and sev­eral other sites have picked up on the story too. There’s some lively com­men­tary on all sites con­cerned, to say the least.

I went back to the KBZK site and watched the “uncut” ver­sion of the inter­view a reporter did with city attor­ney Greg Sullivan. I tran­scribed most of what Sullivan had to say. It’s pasted below.

Sullivan: “The city does that for sev­eral rea­sons. The pri­mary rea­son is hat all the posi­tions that the city hires and all the employ­ees that we have, we view their work for the city as a pub­lic trust to uphold the public’s trust in what we do every day.

“So we have posi­tions rang­ing from fire and police, which require peo­ple of high integrity to have those posi­tions, all the way down to life­guards and the folks that work at city hall here. So we do those types of inves­ti­ga­tions to make sure that the peo­ple that we have have the high­est moral char­ac­ter and are a good fit for the city.”

At this point, Sullivan points out that there are city employ­ees who were hired before the city began ask­ing for social net­work­ing infor­ma­tion on its crim­i­nal back­ground check waiver. From what he under­stands, he said, the city began ask­ing for that infor­ma­tion three or four years ago, “as soon as those social net­work­ing sites became popular.”

The reporter reads the state constitution’s right to pri­vacy clause and asks Sullivan to respond.

“The right of pri­vacy applies to every sin­gle per­son in their daily lives in regard to state action in Montana. It’s one of the most impor­tant rights that we as indi­vid­u­als have. The city takes uphold­ing those pri­vacy rights incred­i­bly seriously.

“So what we’re look­ing at here is a bal­ance to that right to pri­vacy with the needs that the city has to ensure that the employ­ees that are brought on and that work for the city have the high level of integrity and will pro­tect that pub­lic trust.

“What we’re doing is, essen­tially, we’re bal­anc­ing the individual’s right of pri­vacy with the need for the city to ensure that we have the best employ­ees we can. In ensur­ing the pri­vacy, we do that by the, back­ground checks are one tool that we use, along with ref­er­ence checks, the appli­ca­tion itself, and some other things.

“That tool that we use [social net­work checks] only occurs when a pro­vi­sional job offer is made. So we don’t do those inves­ti­ga­tions on the social net­work­ing sites at the begin­ning of the process, but only once we’ve gone through the entire inter­view process. We get to a point where they’re one of the final can­di­dates, and we make a pro­vi­sional job offer. Then we do that back­ground check.

“The other impor­tant thing here is that prior to doing that actual inves­ti­ga­tion, we make sure that that per­son knows that we’re about to do that. And then they know­ingly will con­sent to us doing search.”

The reporter notes that the anony­mous e-mail that brought this to the station’s atten­tion was no so much con­cerned about giv­ing the city the addresses of social net­work­ing pro­files. Instead, that per­son was more con­cerned about giv­ing the city the user­names and pass­words. Sullivan responds:

“In order for us to get access to the cho­sen candidate’s infor­ma­tion, we need to be able to view their page. And so that’s the way we’ve cho­sen to go about doing it. As far as we know, there’s no other way to get into their spe­cific Facebook page.

“One thing that’s impor­tant, too, is that once we ask for that pass­word and we do the review, that pass­word is pro­tected. We don’t share that pass­word with any­body. We keep it in a secure per­son­nel file. And it never goes any­where beyond that. So it’s kept pri­vate. We ensure that in this bal­anc­ing of the pub­lic trust with our employ­ees and the person’s pri­vacy inter­est, we make sure that every step of the way we’re cog­nizant of pro­tect­ing the privacy.

“One thing that’s impor­tant for peo­ple to under­stand about what we look for is that none of the things that the fed­eral con­sti­tu­tion or the state con­sti­tu­tion lists as pro­tected things, we don’t use those, we won’t gather infor­ma­tion based on the person’s race, their age, their mar­i­tal sta­tus, things like that. We don’t use those in our hir­ing deci­sions. What we’re look­ing for are very spe­cific things that go toward that person’s char­ac­ter and their abil­ity to uphold the pub­lic trust. It’s impor­tant for the pub­lic to under­stand, we’re look­ing for very spe­cific infor­ma­tion, not putting out this broad brush stroke of try­ing to find out all sorts of infor­ma­tion about this per­son that we’re not able to use or shouldn’t use in the hir­ing process.”

Sullivan said that he had not heard of any employee get­ting that far into the appli­ca­tion and inter­view process and then reject­ing the pro­vi­sional job offer because the city asked for his or her passwords.

He also said the city uses its inves­ti­ga­tions into a person’s social net­work­ing sites as “a source of char­ac­ter judge­ment” and he went on to look at only one exam­ple, police offi­cer candidates:

“If a can­di­date is show­ing things in their past that were evi­dence of crim­i­nal behav­ior that would raise flags with us about whether that police offi­cer would be a good can­di­date to pro­tect the City of Bozeman.”

“We’ve designed this pro­gram to make sure that we pro­tect people’s pri­vacy, that they have knowl­edge that we’re doing these types of searches, and that we bal­ance that with this pub­lic trust.”

On a semi-legal note here, I’d like to point out that MySpace and Facebook, just to name two, expressly for­bid you from reveal­ing your pass­word to any third party in their terms of ser­vice. By turn­ing over this infor­ma­tion, you’re vio­lat­ing those sites’ TOS, and your account could be suspended.

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A letter to the Bozeman city attorney

By Michael Becker | Published: June 18, 2009
This entry is part 2 of 18 in the series Bozeman Privacy Fiasco

I e-mailed this to city attor­ney Greg Sullivan a few min­utes ago. I post it here in the hopes that oth­ers will send sim­i­lar e-mails ques­tion­ing the City of Bozeman’s pol­icy of ask­ing for social net­work­ing pass­words on a waiver for city job appli­cants’ crim­i­nal back­ground checks. I also sent it to the local news­pa­per and tele­vi­sion station.

Mr. Sullivan,

I watched the KBZK news story about the city’s hir­ing prac­tices, espe­cially the crim­i­nal back­ground check. I’m con­cerned that ask­ing poten­tial employ­ees for their Web pass­words and user­names is an ille­gal vio­la­tion of pri­vacy, and I hope you’ll answer a few ques­tions about the policy.

  1. When was the pol­icy enacted? In other words, exactly when did the city begin ask­ing poten­tial employ­ees for their passwords?
  2. Do all poten­tial employ­ees fill out the crim­i­nal back­ground check waiver, or only employ­ees who have been pro­vi­sion­ally offered a job?
  3. If all employ­ees must fill out the back­ground check waiver, then what hap­pens to the paper­work for the appli­cants who later do not become city employ­ees? That is to say, how many peo­ple have given the city their account names and pass­words who did not later get a job with the city? Are their records pro­tected in secure files, as you say the city employ­ees’ records are? Are they shred­ded, burned, oth­er­wise destroyed?
  4. What impact does it have on a person’s chances of obtain­ing a city job if that per­son refuses to fill out that por­tion of the back­ground check waiver, cit­ing pri­vacy prin­ci­ples? Must a poten­tial employee fill that sec­tion out in order to be con­sid­ered for employment?
  5. What hap­pens if it is dis­cov­ered that a per­son lied on that appli­ca­tion and listed no Web accounts when, in real­ity, that per­son had accounts?
  6. For the peo­ple hired to the city before this became a pol­icy: If those peo­ple have Facebook accounts or other sim­i­lar Web ser­vice accounts, have they been asked to sub­mit their pass­words and user­names to the city to keep on file? Or are those peo­ple per­mit­ted to have social media accounts with­out city oversight?
  7. Exactly who gets to see an applicant’s pri­vate Web data? Names and titles would be nice to have.
  8. Explain how it can pos­si­bly be fair for a per­son to place trust in city employ­ees and give pass­words to their per­sonal Web accounts when the appli­cant is clearly not trusted to be an adult on those sites? In other words, what makes the city employ­ees fair judges of accept­able behav­ior on social net­work­ing sites?
  9. Have city employ­ees been trained in pri­vacy mat­ters and sen­si­tiv­ity issues when it comes to social net­work­ing sites? If train­ing has been done, who did the train­ing, and exactly which city employ­ees received that train­ing. How much did any such train­ing cost the city?
  10. Have city employ­ees been trained to nav­i­gate and use every sin­gle social net­work­ing site that an appli­cant could list on that waiver, or will the employ­ees be bum­bling around in sites they have never heard of before?
  11. How much time does a city employee on a hir­ing com­mit­tee spend on each social net­work­ing site listed by the appli­cant? Hours? Minutes?
  12. Is pro­vid­ing such infor­ma­tion on the waiver required?
  13. As the KBZK reporter pointed out to you, the state con­sti­tu­tion grants Montanans a right to pri­vacy unless the state can show a com­pelling inter­est to over­come that right. Please explain why this pol­icy con­sti­tutes a “com­pelling state interest.”
  14. Finally, you said sev­eral times in the KBZK inter­view that the city looks for “very spe­cific infor­ma­tion” (you used that word­ing twice) about appli­cants. Please list the spe­cific things you look for on those sites. If you have a rubric for deter­min­ing a person’s trust­wor­thi­ness, moral char­ac­ter or oth­er­wise accept­abil­ity, please attach it to your response.

As a con­cerned cit­i­zen of Bozeman, I hope that you’ll take the time to respond to each of these ques­tions and attach any rel­e­vant links, memos, or legal doc­u­ments explain­ing this policy.

–Michael Becker

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Aggregated media coverage of Bozeman privacy fiasco

By Michael Becker | Published: June 18, 2009
This entry is part 3 of 18 in the series Bozeman Privacy Fiasco

According to KBZK’s after­noon update, Bozeman city attor­ney Greg Sullivan said he had met with the city’s human resources depart­ment and that “the mat­ter is being dis­cussed.” Reporter Dan Boyle’s report goes on to say:

Officials said they are look­ing into the legal­ity of the require­ment. They also said they are look­ing into Facebook’s policies.

City Manager Chris Kukulski said the city stands by its back­ground check pol­icy. He told KBZK that “it’s impor­tant for judg­ing the char­ac­ter of future police, fire­men and other employees.”

Kukulski told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle that “the city checks the sites in order to ensure that employ­ees who might be han­dling tax­payer money, work­ing with chil­dren in recre­ation pro­grams or enter­ing res­i­dents’ homes as an emer­gency ser­vices worker are rep­utable and honest.”

Assistant City Manager Chuck Winn told CBSNews.com, “Before we offer peo­ple employ­ment in a pub­lic trust posi­tion we have a respon­si­bil­ity to do a thor­ough back­ground check... This is just a com­po­nent of a thor­ough back­ground check.”

Winn went on to tell CBS:

“Shame on us if there was infor­ma­tion out there avail­able about a per­son who applied for a job who was a child moles­ter or had some sort of infor­ma­tion out there on the Internet that kind of showed those propen­si­ties and we didn’t look for it, we didn’t ask, and we hired that per­son,” Winn said. “In many ways we would have let the pub­lic down.“

Winn told CBS that appli­cants are not required to sup­ply their user­names and pass­words, but that there would be reper­cus­sions if appli­cants or employ­ees lied or were deceit­ful dur­ing the hir­ing process.

Winn said a police offi­cer logs in to check on the social net­work­ing sites of peo­ple apply­ing for pub­lic safety jobs, police and fire. For other jobs, the city’s human resources depart­ment logs in.

Winn told the Chronicle that “it’s not about taste or any­thing” and that “in at least one instance, an applicant’s social-networking site fig­ured into dis­qual­i­fy­ing the per­son for a job.” Police Chief Mark Lachapelle told the Chronicle that infor­ma­tion from the site (Facebook, I pre­sume) was one com­po­nent that con­tributed to the deci­sion. He declined to dis­cuss the case more specif­i­cally, cit­ing pri­vacy concerns.

From the CBS article:

Bozeman’s Winn said the city does not want to be the “taste police” and is focused on look­ing for evi­dence of ille­gal activ­ity. “They can log in them­selves,” he said. “If not, they can show us what’s on their face page. ‘Yes, I have a face page but I don’t want to show it to you.’ That’s a fine answer. We’ll use other resources out there to do a through back­ground check. We owe it to the public.“

The Associated Press also spoke to Bozeman City Commissioner Jeff Rupp, who said that he was “unaware local offi­cials had imple­mented the pol­icy, and expects the city com­mis­sion will be talk­ing about it. But Rupp said it is not as bad as it sounds, since appli­cants are not scored neg­a­tively for refus­ing to answer the question.”

Rupp told the AP: “I can tell you I would not pro­vide it in an appli­ca­tion I sub­mit. [...] I have been told repeat­edly it is not scored, and the appli­ca­tion is not dis­carded if not provided.”

The AP also spoke to state Rep. Brady Wiseman (D-Bozeman):

Rep. Brady Wiseman, a Bozeman Democrat, led the state’s fight against the Patriot Act when the Legislature issued a harsh cri­tique of the fed­eral act, argu­ing it tram­pled civil lib­er­ties and put the gov­ern­ment into a posi­tion of snoop­ing on citizens.

Wiseman said Bozeman now is going too far.

“Asking for pass­words is over the line,” Wiseman said. “I think that this notion opens up a whole new line of debate on privacy.”

CBS also got a com­ment from an attor­ney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

“I think its inde­fen­si­bly inva­sive and likely ille­gal as a vio­la­tion of the First Amendment rights of job appli­cants,” said Kevin Bankston, an EFF attor­ney. “Essentially they’re con­di­tion­ing your appli­ca­tion for employ­ment on your waiv­ing your First Amendment rights ... and risk­ing the secu­rity of your infor­ma­tion by requir­ing you to share your pass­word with them... Where does it stop? How about a pho­to­copy of your diary?“

The Bozeman Daily Chronicle’s story had these com­ments from the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Montana ACLU, Scott Crichton:

I would guess that they’re on some shaky legal ground with this and we would cer­tainly wel­come (the oppor­tu­nity) to look at some­thing spe­cific from some­body who’s impacted. [...] It’s like say­ing, ‘Let me look through your e-mails.’ [...] The city cer­tainly has access to pub­licly acces­si­ble infor­ma­tion, but it gets pretty ques­tion­able when they start ask­ing for password-protected things that are cre­ated to cre­ate pri­vacy for com­mu­ni­ca­tions between your friends and fam­ily,” he said. “That seems to be going too far.

The AP spoke to some­one else at the ACLU, Amy Cannata:

“I liken it to them say­ing they want to look at your love let­ters and your fam­ily pho­tos,” said Amy Cannata, with the American Civil Liberties Union of Montana. “I think this pol­icy cer­tainly crosses the pri­vacy line.”

[...]

Cannata, with the ACLU, said her orga­ni­za­tion has not found another gov­ern­ment body that asks for such infor­ma­tion. And even though the ACLU has not done a full legal analy­sis, she said the Bozeman pol­icy doesn’t pass the smell test.

“It’s one thing, and I think totally rea­son­able, if some­one has a pub­lic pro­file to go check it out,” Cannata said.

But pri­vate groups and pro­file could reveal infor­ma­tion employ­ers could not legally base hir­ing deci­sions on, such as a person’s reli­gion, she added.

“Are they going to go in and look at those things?” Cannata said. “And even if they don’t intend to look at those things, it’s still there for them to see.”

Boyle’s story also said that the city has heard from reporters from National Public Radio, Fox News, CBS and ABC. E-mails were report­edly com­ing into the city’s accounts at a rate of one each minute from around the world. Web sites like Read-Write Web, Slashdot, CNET, InternetNews.com, The Inquisitr, Ars Technica, Boing Boing, PC Authority, PerezHilton.com and Computer World picked up the story, and the British news­pa­per The Guardian named Bozeman its pri­vacy vil­lain of the week.

Facebook’s response was posted to an arti­cle by Cade Metz in The Register. From Metz’s article:

Facebook is not pleased with the Bozeman sit­u­a­tion and plans to con­tact the City. “This is a vio­la­tion of Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which received feed­back from users and was ulti­mately approved in a site-wide vote,” the com­pany tells us. “Our poli­cies pro­hibit those who use the ser­vice from solic­it­ing login infor­ma­tion or access­ing an account that belongs to some­one else. In addi­tion to vio­lat­ing Facebook’s poli­cies, we think this prac­tice vio­lates per­sonal pri­vacy, and we plan to reach out to the City of Bozeman to dis­cuss it with them.”

Ars Technica writer John Timmer noted that the city’s inva­sion of pri­vacy is ironic, con­sid­er­ing the city’s own com­pre­hen­sive pri­vacy pol­icy on its Web site.

This is espe­cially ironic given that Bozeman’s web­site has an exten­sive pri­vacy pol­icy that indi­cates a sig­nif­i­cant famil­iar­ity with some of the major issues that have cropped up regard­ing the reten­tion and secu­rity of infor­ma­tion entrusted to websites.

Timmer con­cludes his write-up with a good point:

It’s prob­a­bly safer to ascribe this sort of behav­ior to clue­less­ness rather than mal­ice. But the clue­less­ness is appar­ently a two-way street, as Sullivan indi­cated that nobody has objected to the city’s request for login credentials.

Lisa Hoover at Computer World:

It’s not about hav­ing any­thing to hide — because I don’t. It’s about a fun­da­men­tal right to pri­vacy and the expec­ta­tion that what I do behind the walls of a pass­worded site is between me and a Web server. I fully grasp that any time you do some­thing online, you run the risk it will become pub­lic infor­ma­tion even you think it won’t hap­pen. I’ll be darned, though, if I would will­ingly turn over the keys to my Internet exis­tence to a ran­dom per­son when there isn’t even the guar­an­tee of a job in return.

A writer at DaniWeb points out that judges have, in some cases, ruled that vio­lat­ing a Web site’s terms of ser­vice is an ille­gal act.

In addi­tion to the pri­vacy aspects—which would enable city employ­ees to post items under the applicant’s name, and make or delete friends—some social net­work­ing sites con­sider pass­ing on pass­words to be a vio­la­tion of their terms of ser­vice, which some judges have ruled is a crim­i­nal act.

Steven Hodson at The Inquisitr writes:

I can totally under­stand the City’s desire to pro­tect the integrity of its employ­ees but this kind of inva­sion is no dif­fer­ent than them ask­ing for the keys to your home and com­ing in when­ever they feel like it. Sure it’s plau­si­ble to defend this require­ment for any pub­lic social media accounts – but then they wouldn’t need the pass­words – how­ever when it comes to any accounts that we have made pri­vate they have no busi­ness ask­ing for this infor­ma­tion, let alone mak­ing it a require­ment for a job.

I fixed a font dis­play issue in this post on July 6, 2009, and cor­rected for­mat­ted the first block­quote from Dan Boyle’s report.

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Late afternoon Bozeman fiasco update

By Michael Becker | Published: June 18, 2009
This entry is part 4 of 18 in the series Bozeman Privacy Fiasco

As I’ve already writ­ten today, the City of Bozeman, Montana, has been doing some ques­tion­able stuff when it comes to back­ground checks on job appli­cants. The city has asked appli­cants for the user­names and pass­words to their social media accounts for “three or four years,” the city attor­ney told KBZK news on Wednesday.

The news spread from KBZK to Boing Boing and then to other news sites and blogs. And of course thou­sands of peo­ple fanned the fire on Twitter. (I was among them.) Now, KBZK is report­ing that the city’s receiv­ing an “e-mail a minute” about the mat­ter, includ­ing my own. I was even inter­viewed by the tele­vi­sion sta­tion for the follow-up story they’re work­ing on, and I under­stand that the news­pa­per will have a full story tomorrow.

I won’t get into the issues in-depth; I’ll save that for a post later tonight. I do want to point to that e-mail-a-minute fig­ure as an exam­ple of what can hap­pen when social media kicks into high gear. I started post­ing about this fiasco at about 10:30 last night, and many, many peo­ple joined in — more peo­ple from more places around the coun­try than I hon­estly thought would join in.

As a result, the city is “look­ing” at their pol­icy, which I think means that we’ll see some changes soon, at least some heavy expla­na­tion and maybe even some backpedal­ing. Whatever the out­come, I think we can say that social net­works and their users had an effect on the real world today, an effect I hope makes Bozeman a bet­ter place to work.

More to come.

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Bozeman backtracks on privacy matters

By Michael Becker | Published: June 20, 2009
This entry is part 5 of 18 in the series Bozeman Privacy Fiasco

In case you haven’t yet heard, the City of Bozeman has rescinded the part of its back­ground check form that asked for appli­cants’ pass­words for social net­work­ing and other Web sites.

“The extent of our request for a candidate’s pass­word, user name, or other Internet infor­ma­tion appears to have exceeded that which is accept­able to our com­mu­nity,” City Manager Chris Kukulski said in a state­ment released Friday afternoon.

As of noon on June 19, the city has stopped ask­ing job can­di­dates for their user­names and pass­words, and until fur­ther notice, the city has sus­pended its prac­tice of peek­ing at appli­cants’ pass­word pro­tected Web infor­ma­tion “until the City con­ducts a more com­pre­hen­sive eval­u­a­tion of the prac­tice.” In essence, they won’t snoop using the pass­words they have already col­lected until they talk about it some more.

The city com­mis­sion will dis­cuss the mat­ter at its meet­ing Monday night at 6 in the com­mis­sion room at city hall, 121 N. Rouse Ave. The agenda is scant on details as to just what the com­mis­sion will dis­cuss, but at least they’re talk­ing about it now.

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