Anonymity breach upsets town's online chatter
Some say Rockland police invaded privacy
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ROCKLAND - Participatory democracy flourishes here, thanks in part to a local message board that enables residents to post news and gossip and gripe about local issues - sometimes pungently - because they can do so under the guise of anonymous user names.
Until two weeks ago, that is, when the town's second-highest police official posted an item suggesting the school committee chairman was the person who posted information last month about an upcoming police sobriety checkpoint.
There is no way of knowing whether any drunk visitors to RocklandNews.com evaded arrest. But Police Lieutenant Barry Ashton's decision to post an item on Oct. 15 pointing to School Committee Chairman Mark Norris as the likely leaker has roiled the town, raising eyebrows about how Ashton was able to breach the site's privacy protections and worries that in the future, anonymous postings might not remain anonymous, if police decide it is in their best interests to unmask the writer.
Ashton's action may also have run afoul of a federal law designed to protect Internet privacy. The statute says that law enforcement officials can obtain the identity of a computer user only if they obtain a subpoena or court order in the belief a crime has been committed. The same law also bars Internet service providers and message board operators from disclosing the identity of posters unless police follow those prescribed steps, according to John Verdi, staff counsel of the Washington, D.C.-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public interest research organization specializing in Internet-related civil liberties issues.
"This is a bad precedent for police to set - to identify an anonymous individual who has committed no crime and is not even suspected of committing a crime," Verdi said in a telephone interview. "What the police did in this case has a potential chilling effect on free speech, by making others reluctant to exercise their First Amendment rights."
The original Sept. 20 posting, at 7:58 p.m. from "WATCHER," read like gossip: "Not sure if it is true but heard there will be a sobriety checkpoint setup tonight on Market Street in front of Ocean State Job Lot beginning around 9 p.m. Beware!" The checkpoint started at 11 p.m. Over three hours, police said, 54 drivers were stopped. Nine were arrested on drunken driving charges, and two for other offenses.
On Oct. 15, Ashton - "Capt Jack" in his frequent postings - went on the message board to decry the leak and report that a police investigation had determined that the warning about the checkpoint "came from a computer in the home of School Committee Chairman Mark Norris.
In speaking with Mr. Norris, he was aware of the posting but denied that he posted this information."
Ashton acknowledged in an interview - as he had in his own posting - that whoever posted the Sept. 20 item did nothing illegal.
Ashton also confirmed that he never sought a subpoena or a court order to track the culprit.
He refused, however, to disclose how he traced the posting, saying that to do so would tip criminals off to the methodology of police investigations.
Norris, reached by telephone, said he would not discuss the issue and had no idea how Ashton decided that he was "WATCHER."
But not long after Ashton's posting, Norris posted a response under his own name denying that the sobriety checkpoint item originated from his house. Minutes later, one of the message board's administrators posted a reply, saying the computer used by Norris and "WATCHER" were one and the same.
Brian White, the message board's chief administrator, said he provided no information to police, and that the site's other administrators assured him that they divulged nothing to police. Jim Hughes, a spokesman for
Within 24 hours of Ashton's posting and the cascade of comments that followed, White said, he removed them all at the request of Norris.
But in the intervening 24 hours, White said, Ashton's posting ballooned into the fastest-growing thread he has seen in the five years he has overseen the site - nearly 100 responses and 5,000 hits.
Those comments included some expressing support for the police investigation, but many others that expressed concern at what they saw as heavy-handed police response that overstepped ethical and legal boundaries.
"There is no proof that the person you named is factually culpable. You never should have named anyone in this fiasco . . .," wrote Carol Perilli, who sits on the town's Energy and Community Development Advisory committees. "This is about privacy laws and civil rights and social order."
Megan McKee can be reached at megan.mckee@gmail.com.
