From the February 1999 Idaho Observer:

HB 38 will electronically integrate criminal records with national, international database.

Currently before the Idaho state House Judiciary Committee is a bill that will provide for the electronic consolidation, storage and transfer of the state's criminal records. HB 38 intends to make Idaho Department of Law Enforcement (and all other state law enforcement agencies) part of the new, globally-cooperative environment of international law enforcement. Photo and fingerprint transmission and data banks will be maintained and “shared” with law enforcement agencies in other states. The records will also be made available to the federal government and cooperating foreign law enforcement agencies throughout the world.

The comprehensive and Orwellianly-written text of the bill uses child-molester control as the carrot to entice public support for this scheme. The bill can be studied in its entirety by downloading it at: http://www.idwr.state.id.us/oasis/H0038.html.

As with most legislation, the bill sounds like it will benefit the people of the state. The bill sounds as if it could become an essential tool in the fight to control criminal behavior in an age where people can hop on an airplane and be anywhere in the world within 24 hours and hit the send button to instantaneously transfer data to any computer anywhere on the planet.

However, the bill is more sinister than our naive or duplicitous legislators are prepared to understand. Read the following scenario and understand that, under the new law that the legislature will undoubtedly pass because it sounds so noble, your barking dog could cause the creation of a criminal record that will be accessible to any cooperating law enforcement entity on earth. ~DWH

by T. Allen Hoover

In Boise, a barking dog can result in the police coming, and if you are not home, they may leave a ticket on your door. A single mom who holds several jobs came home and found such a ticket.

The location of the dog and the fenced yard could only have meant that there had been intruders and the dog barked at them, then at the "intruding" cops.

The cops left a ticket.

Mom had no money and let the due date go by, expecting that they would send another notice (like they do with traffic citations). One night, with her three kids in the car, she got stopped for failing to signal for a left turn.

The cops found a warrant for ignoring the barking dog ticket. The kids were taken to child protection, the car was impounded and she was handcuffed, searched, and taken to jail, fingerprinted and photographed. Simply because her dog was caught barking and she failed to recognize the seriousness of the crime, the mother now has a “criminal record.”

HB 38, if the legislature is indifferent enough to our rights of privacy that it passes the bill into law, would make her fingerprints and photograph available to foreign powers as she is now a “criminal.” Her photo could be used in a photo line up in South Carolina (or wherever) and she might be fingered for a crime in a state she has never been to. The “system” can then arrest, extradite, prosecute, take her children and ruin her life while forcing her to spend what few resources she has to defend her innocence.

The bill does, however, admit that a person may be held as guilty of a crime until proven innocent. HB 38 specifies a banner be tagged to any transmitted data stating that, “An arrest without a disposition is not an admission of guilt.”

Mr. Hoover is from Boise and is an active participant in “our” representative form of government and can often be found sitting in on and testifying before legislative committees at the state capitol.