By Laurie Asseo, Associated Press, 01/12/00
WASHINGTON - Congress can protect motorists' privacy by barring states from selling the personal information on driver's licenses, the Supreme Court ruled today.
The law does not violate states' rights, the justices said in a unanimous decision that ran counter to their recent trend of reining in Congress' power over the states.
The case involves South Carolina's challenge to the 1994 Driver's Privacy Protection Act, enacted in response to the 1989 killing of actress Rebecca Schaeffer by a stalker who used a private investigator to get her address from driver's license records.
The act "does not require the states in their sovereign capacity to regulate their own citizens," Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote for the court.
"It does not require the South Carolina Legislature to enact any laws or regulations, and it does not require state officials to assist in the enforcement of federal statutes regulating private individuals," the chief justice said.
The law bars states and their employees from releasing personal information from motor vehicle records, including names, addresses, telephone and Social Security numbers and photographs.
States routinely have sold such information to businesses and political candidates, earning millions of dollars in revenue each year. When Congress enacted the law, 34 states made driver's license records public in some form.
The law includes exceptions, allowing such information to be disclosed to law enforcement officials, courts, government agencies and private investigators. No exemption is included for the news media.
The decision was criticized by Gregg Leslie, acting Executive Director of the Reporters'
Committee for Freedom of the Press.
"For perhaps 100 years, state legislators have always made these decisions by balancing privacy with the public need to know," Leslie said. "Then without research, Congress, reacting to some scares, made a sweeping decision to deny access to all this information."
South Carolina argued that Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce did not give it the authority to govern the release of such state records. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed in 1998 and blocked the law's enforcement in South Carolina, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia.
Justice Department lawyers argued to the Supreme Court that releasing driver's license records means people are forced to provide the key to their personal information on their license plates.
But South Carolina's lawyers said state employees could not be required to enforce a federal law.
In 1997, the justices ruled that Congress could not force the states to conduct background checks on prospective gun buyers.
However, Rehnquist said today's case was more like a 1988 case in which the Supreme Court upheld a law that barred states from issuing unregistered bonds. The law regulated state activities but did not try to control how states regulate private parties, the court said at the time.
Last October, Congress sought to buttress its power to keep states from making driver's license records public. Lawmakers passed a new version of the ban but tied it to Congress' broader authority over spending, applying the ban to any state that receives federal transportation funds. That law was not at issue in today's ruling.
The case is Reno vs. Condon, 98-1464.
