PRIVACY WINS ONE

These have been tough times for privacy. Government databases are
proliferating at an alarming rate, businesses track and trade consumer
preferences, and Internet pop-up ads offer miniature surveillance cameras
so buyers can do God-knows-what. But privacy won a round the other day in
Colorado's Supreme Court. The Court ruled that a bookstore does not have to
divulge customer sales records to assist the police with their inquiries. A
March, 2000, raid of a methamphetamine lab turned up two books on how to
make illegal substances. Outside the trailer housing the lab officers found
an envelope from the Tattered Cover bookstore. They wanted the bookstore's
sales records to determine which of the trailer's residents had bought the
books.

The Court said a hearing had to be held before law-enforcement officials
could execute a search warrant on the bookstore. The bookstore itself was
not the subject of a police investigation, and no one has accused the owner
of any illegal activity. The city's need for the information, the Court
said, did not outweigh the harmful effect to the First Amendment and the
Colorado constitution, both of which "protect an individual's fundamental
right to purchase books anonymously, free from governmental interference."

Free from governmental interference. In much of the world those words
express an alien concept. Even here - where a recent poll found 39 percent
of the public in favor of government restrictions on comedy routines that
might make light of September 11, and where Congress, to great cheering
among the press, passed a campaign-finance bill that interferes with
political speech - the concept seems to be honored as often in the breach
as in the observance. Those who value their privacy should therefore give
thanks to the Colorado Supremes for upholding a principle lately much beset.