Page 126 - Privacy in a Cyber Age Policy and Practice

114 PRIVACY IN A CYBER AGE

Today, a wide variety of public figures call for giving everyone a second
chance. Texas governor and former presidential candidate Rick Perry said,
“The idea that we lock people up, throw them away, and never give them a
chance of redemption is not what America is about [. . .] Being able to give
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someone a second chance is very important.” New York Representative
Charles Rangel is “a firm believer that upon release, ex-offenders should
be afforded a second chance to become productive citizens by providing
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rehabilitation and education that will help them join the workforce.” For-
mer Secretary of State Hillary Clinton frequently asserts that “everyone
deserves a second chance, a third chance to keep going and to make some-
thing of themselves [. . .] That was one of the most important lessons of
my life.” Famous singer and former drug addict El DeBarge called for “the
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world to know that everybody deserves a second chance.” Rabbi Bernard
Barsky asked, “How could a Jewish community not be committed to giving
ex-felons a second chance? Our entire faith is based on stories of second
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chances.” And even church leader the Reverend Glenn Grayson, whose
eighteen-year-old son was shot and killed, said that “if [God] can give us a
second chance, [. . .] there are things you have to atone for, but you deserve
a second chance.” 5
The Internet poses a great technological challenge to social forgiveness.
By indexing digital versions of local public records, the Internet acts as
a bright light that casts people’s shadows much further than ever before:
criminal or otherwise debilitating records now follow people wherever they
go. True, arrest records, criminal sentences, bankruptcy filings, and even
divorce records were accessible to the public long before being digitized.
Some were listed in blotters kept in police stations, others in courthouses;
anyone who wished to take the trouble could go there and read them. But
most people did not. Above all, there was no way for people in distant com-
munities to find these damning facts without going to inordinate lengths.
Following the advent of the cyber age, online databases have dramatically
increased the size of the audience that has access to public information and
the ease with which it can be examined. Several companies have started
compiling criminal records and making them available to everyone in the
country and, indeed, the world. For instance, PeopleFinders, a company
based in Sacramento, California, recently introduced CriminalSearches.
com, a free service to access public criminal records, which draws data
from local courthouses. Similar services provide access to many other types
of public records that range from birth records to divorces. According to the
National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, this “growing obses-
sion with background checking and commercial exploitation of arrest and
conviction records makes it all but impossible for someone with a criminal
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record to leave the past behind.” This is particularly apparent in the United