Arrest-Proof Yourself by Dale C. Carson, Wes Denham Page A

clearly written in the Constitution, but until I was a teenager in the 1960s, Southern governors and legislators had difficulty understanding the concept. The sudden appearance of thousands of federal employees with uniforms, helmets, and guns brought about a rapid increase in the understanding of standard English among the Southern lawmaking elite. Here’s the bottom line: until privacy rights are enacted into law, and the law is elaborated into rules of criminal and civil procedure, and these laws and rules are upheld by judges and enforced by government employees wearing guns, you don’t have privacy rights.

THE RIGHT TO BE LEFT ALONE 3
     
    As legislatures and Congress force themselves to contemplate privacy rights, I’d like to respectfully suggest they consider another right—to be left alone. The major problem addressed by this book is this: arrest is tantamount to conviction. It doesn’t matter that, after you were arrested, your case was “nol prossed” ( nolle prosequi , Latin for “not prosecuted”) or that you were acquitted. Outside the criminal justice system, few people pay attention to such distinctions. Even if you were acquitted, people figure you were arrested , weren’t you? You must have been doing something . In the computer age, that arrest will follow you forever, and become, in essence, a lifetime sentence of shame, lost opportunities, and underemployment.
    There are two antithetical trends occurring in this country. The first is the encouragement of diversity. We should understand people of different skin colors, religions, sexual orientations, and social circumstances. We should be less judgmental and cut our fellow beings a little slack. Perhaps we should even decriminalize drug use and think of this as a lifestyle choice, etc.
    The second trend, far less discussed, is the enforcement of conformity. Any divergence from a narrow range of behavior is now punished by lifetime incarceration on the social services plantation and the electronic plantation. Arrests, traffic violations, debt payments, notes taken by schoolteachers and counselors and employers, and even malicious gossip contained in law enforcement interviews is subject to being indelibly recorded on computer databases and accessed by way too many people.
    These two trends, of diversity and conformity, are antithetical. Advances in surveillance and data transmission make the power to enforce conformity overwhelming, even if its dispersed nature makes it less talked about and more difficult to understand. In an age in which your whereabouts are continuously recordable from GPS chips in your car and cell phone (or, if you are in custody, from your ankle bracelet) and your comings and goings at home and work are recorded by neighborhood and employment security systems that note each time you open gates and doors, privacy is a fiction. Ex-spouses, prospective employers, litigants, personal enemies, and even blackmailers can access this information at any time, sometimes with a subpoena, often without.
    In a world where nothing is ever forgotten, nothing is ever forgiven. There is no wiggle room for minor indiscretions. Having a run-in with the cops, getting a traffic ticket, being somewhere you’re not supposed to be—these should not carry the life sentence of a permanent record. Once you’re on the electronic plantation, every cop, every government employee, every human resources weenie, every wireless phone company, and every geek with a credit card and Internet access is your judge and critic. As for ex-wives? Let’s not even go there! Who can stand such scrutiny? In the Bible the Lord declares, “Judgment is mine.” He has a point.
    The protection of privacy is advanced in Europe (where even release of employee work telephone extensions is a crime) but practically ignored here. “Privacy issues,” alas, are discussed in this country by academic types in the plummy tones of National Public Radio. The issue is an eye