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The First Amendment and Information Gathering:

By on January 30, 2008 6:47 pm

Prof. Mark Kleiman (The Reality-Based Community) and Prof. Michael Froomkin (Discourse.net) rightly condemn this move by some New York officials:

Richard Falkenrath, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, … and Mayor Michael Bloomberg have asked the City Council to pass a law requiring anyone who wants to own [machines that detect traces of biological, chemical, and radiological weapons] to get a permit from the police first. And it’s not just devices to detect weaponized anthrax that they want the power to control, but those that detect everything from industrial pollutants to asbestos in shoddy apartments. Want to test for pollution in low-income neighborhoods with high rates of childhood asthma? Gotta ask the cops for permission. Why? So you “will not lead to excessive false alarms and unwarranted anxiety,” the first draft of the law states.

Last week, Falkenrath made his case for the new law before the City Council’s Public Safety Committee, where Councilman Peter Vallone introduced the bill and chaired the hearing. Dozens of university researchers, public-health professionals, and environmental lawyers sat in the crowd, horrified by the prospect that if this law passes, their work detecting and warning the public about airborne pollutants will become next to impossible. But Falkenrath pressed on, saying that unless the police can determine who gets to look for nasty stuff floating in the air, the city would be paralyzed by fear.

“There are currently no guidelines regulating the private acquisition of biological, chemical, and radiological detectors,” warned Falkenrath, adding that this law was suggested by officials within the Department of Homeland Security. “There are no consistent standards for the type of detectors used, no requirement that they be reported to the police department—or anyone else, for that matter—and no mechanism for coordinating these devices…. Our mutual goal is to prevent false alarms … by making sure we know where these detectors are located, and that they conform to standards of quality and reliability.” …

As the opposition mounted, Vallone pulled the proposed legislation just before the meeting’s end and agreed to give it a second look…. He and his colleagues will try to accommodate all the concerns when they redraft the bill, he said, but one way or another, the cops are going to have this new power….

This is the very model of government paternalism, and likely counterproductive government paternalism at that. But Mark asks: Does it violate the First Amendment, because it deliberately interferes with information gathering?

I think the answer has to be: Nobody knows. The Supreme Court has said surprisingly little about restrictions on information gathering (as opposed to restrictions on information dissemination, which is what most of the Court’s Free Speech/Press Clause caselaw is about).

We do know that generally speaking there’s no First-Amendment-based information gathering defense to generally applicable laws, such as bans on travel to Cuba and the like. We also know that there’s generally no First Amendment right of access to information that’s in the government hands (except for a historically sanctioned presumptive right of access to criminal trials, which lower courts have reasonably extended to civil trials and to most court filings in civil and criminal cases).

But here the government is proposing the licensing of certain products precisely because of a fear that the products will be used to gather information, and then to disseminate the information in ways that the government claims might be misleading. That sure sounds bad, because the government’s rationale is frankly concerned with the communicative impact of the speech that will eventually flow from use of the devices.

Moreover, the fear isn’t just that the devices and the speech they facilitate will infringe privacy (a rationale for banning certain forms of information gathering, such as unauthorized recording of conversations, and potentially even the distribution of certain kinds of eavesdropping restrictions). Rather, it’s that it will lead to speech that will mislead and frighten the citizenry into doing foolish things — a classically disfavored rationale in First Amendment law.

So I think there’s a perfectly credible First Amendment argument against any such ban — as well as lots of first-rate policy arguments (for some plausible-seeming examples, see this American Industrial Hygiene Association letter). But there’s no Supreme Court caselaw squarely confronting this subject, so predictions are hard to make (though if anyone can point me to some useful lower court caselaw on the subject, I’d love to read it).

UPDATE: Thanks to John Wilson from the UCLA Law Library, I now have the text of the proposed amendment:

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