Give Them Your Name and Give Up Your Rights

We are entering a world in which our day-to-day activities as private citizens leave us vulnerable to an officious police check on every bit of information that any source, public or private, has gathered about us.

Not only the guilty have reason to fear. As the Electronic Privacy Information Center wrote in its amicus brief in Hiibel's case, "a name is no longer a simple identifier: It is the key to a vast, cross-referenced system of public and private databases, which lay bare the most intimate features of an individual's life. If any person can be coerced by the state to hand over this key to the police, then the protections of the 4th and 5th Amendments have been rendered illusory."

Nevada claims that merely stating your name would suffice under its statute. But it also says in one of its court filings in the Hiibel case that "if the person provides a false name, the officer may continue to detain the person until the conflict is resolved." This certainly seems to imply an officially authorized state-issued ID is all that will ultimately satisfy authorities.

Technological realities have transformed our world into a fishbowl. If we are to live in that fishbowl, it's imperative that the government be constrained in the circumstances under which it can stick a hook in us.