WHO GETS TO SEE THE DATA?

Fights Over Databases Will Become Common

A battle is brewing in Denver that those who cherish intellectual freedom,
as well as freedom of the press, are watching very closely.

The fight involves on one side a bookstore called "The Tattered Cover," and
on the other side the Denver police and prosecutors.

Last spring, police raided a suspected speed lab in Denver, and they found
among the paraphernalia two books that give instructions on how to prepare
methamphetamines using rustic equipment.

As part of their investigation, officers traced the books to The Tattered
Cover, and they asked the owner to turn over records of who purchased the
books and when, knowing that the bookstore, like so many others, probably
had a computer database that could be accessed to reveal that information.

The owners of the bookstore refused to hand over the information; the
police went to court to force the issue; and a local judge has ruled that
the bookstore cannot withhold it from the investigators.

The bookstore has appealed, and the case will undoubtedly make its way
eventually into federal courts, according to reports in USA Today.

The case is among the first to involve this kind of threat to individual
freedoms, although the most memorable case of this sort erupted on the
national scene when federal prosecutors went on a fishing expedition
several years ago to find out what Monica Lewinsky was reading. That
fishing trip was an outrage.

The situation in Colorado is less outrageous because police have very
narrowly defined what they are looking for and made clear why the
information is important to their case against the speed-lab suspects. For
that reason, the first court to hear the case approved of the request.

Nevertheless, the case should certainly send up a warning signal to all of
us who buy books, rent movies or check out materials from a public library.
All of those places now keep records of purchases on databases that can be
tapped into to reveal our buying or borrowing habits.

This is information that is nobody's business, particularly when police or
prosecutors are just on fishing expeditions, and booksellers must take the
stand that The Tattered Cover has taken if they hope to keep customers
coming back.

On the other hand, when the request is narrow and the information is needed
to make a case against criminal suspects, it's hard to argue that the data
should not be turned over.

More fights of the sort developing in Denver, then, are inevitable, made so
because of the vast amount of information that is kept or that can be kept
on all of us when we do business with credit cards.

National organizations backing The Tattered Cover state that they fear that
police will be emboldened if the bookstore loses and will see these
databases as a gold mine to find information about ordinary citizens. We
tend to doubt that will happen, especially if the courts do what they
should do and make it clear that such data is off limits in all but the
most exceptional circumstances.