NJ Cops Are Suing To Protect Their Exclusive Right To Keep Their Data Out Of Data Brokers’ Databases

I come here not to bury this Wired article, nor to damn it with faint praise. I come to critique it, while realizing the framing and (especially!) the headline may not be the direct responsibility of its author, Paresh Dave.

Privacy laws are hit and miss in the United States. Mostly miss. There’s not a lot of privacy to be had. But when privacy laws get enacted, they tend to benefit the most powerful people first. Even victims’ rights laws — which are supposed to protect crime victims — are most often abused to keep abusive cops’ names out of the headlines because they are supposedly the “victims” of crimes committed by the people they’ve brutalized/killed.

Unsurprisingly, “assaulting an officer” is the most used, with “resisting arrest” following close behind it. As “victims” of these entirely arrest-related crimes, cops have used these laws to make sure the public doesn’t know which officers are engaging in excessive force when effecting arrests.

That leads us to a New Jersey privacy law, one that was enacted after a government employee experienced some of the day-to-day violence we the people are just expected to handle without additional legal protections.

This is from Paresh Dave’s article, which is (unfortunately) sporting this headline:

The Future of Online Privacy Hinges on Thousands of New Jersey Cops

First of all, fuck all that. This case does not have those sorts of implications. Second, this is all about cops ensuring their protections are better than those given to the people they serve. All of that is spelled out in the first two paragraphs:

In July 2020, a 72-year-old attorney posing as a delivery person rang the doorbell at US district judge Esther Salas’ house in North Brunswick, New Jersey. When the door opened, the attorney fired a gun, wounding the judge’s husband—and killing her only child, 20-year-old Daniel Mark Anderl.

The murderer, Salas said, had found her address online and was outraged because she hadn’t handled a case of his client fast enough. In her despair, Salas publicly pleaded, “We can make it hard for those who target us to track us down … We can’t just sit back and wait for another tragedy to strike.”

If everyone had been thinking rationally, the response would have been a law that protected every New Jersey citizen from the indiscriminate harvesting, sale, and access of their personal data. But legislation is rarely rational, and it’s especially irrational when the resulting law is named after the victim.

In New Jersey, it ended with “Daniel’s Law,” which only provides privacy protections for certain public employees.

Today, current and former judges, cops, prosecutors, and others working in criminal justice can have their household’s address and phone numbers withheld from government records in the state. They also can demand that the data be removed from any website, including popular tools for researching people such as Whitepages, Spokeo, Equifax, and RocketReach.

And that’s how that works. Render unto Caesar… and then shut the fuck up. Some defense attorneys might be covered by this law, but presumably only if they’re court-appointed. As for the rest of New Jersey — residents who might not want anyone to access their data and/or have already been subjected to harassment, stalking, etc. — there’s nothing in it for them.

This case — which the headline (and even some of the body of the article) argues might protect the rest of New Jersey residents — is being spearheaded by a lawyer who actually seems to care a bit about personal privacy. Matt Adkisson runs five law firms and is suing 150 companies for exposing cops’ personal data. Prior to that, he turned down multiple millions during an acquisition offer that would have required him to provide access to share tons of personal data his own company… had apparently already harvested.

Never mind. Maybe there’s no true hero here. It certainly isn’t the cops that are advocating for their own personal interest. And the anecdotal evidence doesn’t quite build the case Adkisson is pushing, much less the over-arching narrative the headline of this article is trying to sell.

Like this part of the article, which shows cops love using the same services that sell access to cops’ info. And the only reason the cops care is because it’s their info being sold.

Akisson says the most retaliatory response came from LexisNexis, which lets police and businesses search for people’s contact information and life history, typically for investigations and background checks. He alleges that instead of removing Atlas clients’ phone numbers and addresses from view, LexisNexis needlessly froze their entire files in its system, impeding credit checks some were undergoing for loan applications.

Adkisson and his clients apparently have no problem allowing cops to access this trove of data. And then they have the gall to claim it’s “retaliatory” when a company blocks third-party access to data this lawyer and his clients specifically told them to limit access to. Adkisson knows a thing or two about data collection and access. Perhaps he should have warned his cop clients that going off the grid (by enforcing Daniel’s Law) creates this entirely foreseeable consequence.

I mean, I’m not a lawyer or a cop, but realized that instituting a freeze on credit checks following the Equifax breach would result in credit checks failing to go through and any that did would require my direct interaction. Claiming this is “retaliatory” is like claiming civil rights lawsuits are “retaliatory” when cops deliberately violate rights, to use an analogy his clients might understand.

Then there’s this supposedly illustrative anecdote — something that proves nothing else than that GPS/mapping software works the way people expect it to. Well, people other than this attorney and his cop union client.

He was reminded of that this past May when he took WIRED in his Jeep to meet with Peter Andreyev, a cop in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey, and president of the statewide Policemen’s Benevolent Association. Around dusk that day, Adkisson handed Andreyev a search result for his name on DataTree.com, a website that sells property records. Andreyev slipped on his black-rimmed glasses and brought his linebacker figure toward a conference table to review the page. It took him just two seconds to tense up. “Oh shit,” he said.

He stared at a street-view image of his home, and a birds-eye shot with his address overlaid. The square footage was in there too, for good measure. His head visibly rattling and legs restless, Andreyev pounded the table. “I—I’m pretty infuriated by this.”

Like many law enforcement officers, the 51-year-old rarely goes a day without nightmares about some known thug or detractor attacking him and his family. The DataTree printout reinforced for him that it would take just a few clicks for anyone to target him in the vulnerability of his own home. WIRED pulled up Andreyev’s report from DataTree with just a free trial.

To be surprised by this is to be surprised that people show up at your house after you drop a pin on Google Maps. To be “infuriated” is to be performative — someone who somehow believes their public residence in a house visible from public roads is somehow the equivalent of Area 51: something that only extremely powerful people should have access to, rather than the pitiful peons the cops the PBA president represents pretend to protect and service.

Now, don’t take this critique as an argument against better protections from data harvesters and data brokers. We should all have access to better privacy protections. But what’s happening here ain’t it. This is just a law protecting the most powerful people in our society: judges, prosecutors, and cops. The law doesn’t care about the rest of us. And neither do the people it protects. Further, I would argue, neither does this attorney. If he truly cared, he’d be trying to expand the law to cover the rest of the state’s residents, rather than just collecting checks helping cops expand their extra rights.

And for damn sure the cops don’t care. The last thing they want is limits on data harvesting because it might make their jobs a little more difficult. Whatever’s happening here will — at best — help only these cops who think an operation satellite map is a privacy violation. As for the rest of us, the government still expects us to be an open book that can be browsed at will by anyone with access, even if they mean us harm.