Daily Archives: 24 October 2014

A Number of Misunderstandings

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Los Angeles passed an ordinance requiring hotel operators to give up data in their guest registers to the police, even when they don’t have a warrant.

The ordinance, approved by the city in 2006, requires hotels to collect and maintain guest information such as name and address, the number of people in the guest’s party, vehicle information, arrival and checkout dates, room number, and method of payment. Hotel operators who fail to comply with it face as many as six months behind bars and a $1,000 fine.

A motel operator demurred, and at this point, the 9th Circuit agrees: they struck the ordinance as unconstitutional under the 4th Amendment.

There are a couple of fundamental misunderstandings, though. One is in the 9th‘s ruling, paraphrased by Joe Palazzolo at the above link:

[H]otels have an interest in keeping guest records private, even if the guests themselves have no such privacy rights because they willingly give their information to a third party.

Guests do have a legitimate expectation of privacy regarding “their information,” though. They’re not giving their information to “a” third party; they’re giving it to a particular third party as a necessary thing so that the particular third party can provide the contracted service. Moreover, much of the information that is given over is not necessary for the transaction to occur; it’s mandated by a different third party—a government entity, for the government’s convenience.

A second misunderstanding is in the argument offered by LA’s lawyers.

These laws expressly help police investigate crimes such as prostitution and gambling, capture dangerous fugitives and even authorize federal law enforcement to examine these registers, an authorization which can be vital in the immediate aftermath of a homeland terrorist attack[.]

Say that’s all true. Get a warrant. Time hardly seems of the essence in these hypotheticals, even with the apocalyptically offered “homeland terrorist attack:” the cops are unlikely to be near the hotel or motel when an attack goes in. If time really is of the essence, come armed with a warrant in the first place; they’re disappointingly easy to get.

A third misunderstanding is in Judge Richard Tallman’s dissent, again summarized by Palazzolo.

[T]he hoteliers challenging the ordinance failed to show that police were applying the statute in an unconstitutional way.

The hoteliers had no requirement to do so. The law must be constitutional in the first place; its application by the police is wholly irrelevant after its unconstitutionality is shown.

The matter now is before the Supreme Court, and we’ll learn later who’s right. Legally, anyway.

Trust

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I’m going to poke my nose into European affairs, again.

The backdrop is the French budget crisis. The backdrop to that is this. In one of the EU’s responses to their part in the global economic crisis of 2008-2009, the EU passed the Stability and Growth Pact, which authorized the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union (though the Commission has its own president, the body acts like a President-by-Committee) to require EU member nations to submit their national budgets to Commission approval. If the Commission disapproved the budget and the nation in question refused to make Commission-directed corrections, the Commission could levy very serious fines on that nation.

Among the rules of the Pact is that a national deficit cannot exceed 3% of its GDP: cuts to spending and/or increases in taxes could be required by the Commission to bring the nation’s deficit in line. Various smaller nations in the EU already have been subject to budget disapproval and Commission-required corrections or fines. Belgium, for instance, faced a fine of some €800 million in 2011 ($1,131 million dollars in 2011) until it made corrections. Greece and Italy also have been hit with Commission budget mandated corrections, and they have complied.

Enter France. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has indicated flatly that France will not play by the EU rules to which it is signatory.

I will not permit people to discuss France in this context. France is a big country. We won’t [comply with Commission budget reform requirements].

The French Finance Minister has echoed his boss.

[W]e won’t cut more anywhere, and we also won’t raise taxes.

The Germans, though, despite being economically powerful enough—because it’s still economically sound—to get France to comply, is apparently too timid to do so. Chancellor Angela Merkel has dragged out an old chestnut of hers: “contractual agreements.” These are

written agreements between the European Commission and a Eurozone country that commit that member state to undertake specific savings measures or clearly delineated structural reforms. Under the original plan, the country could then obtain financial aid from a special fund in return. For France, the reward would be a further suspension of the deficit rules.

However. With France saying it’s going to welsh on one contract that it’s signed—that Stability and Growth Pact—how could it be trusted to honor another contract it might sign, a “contractual agreement?”

Manfred Weber, who leads the European People’s Party (think of them as all of Europe’s various Christian Democrats) in European Parliament emphasized the problem.

Europe is at a crossroads. The European Commission’s credibility is at stake with its review of the French and also the Italian budgets. France’s budget has to be rejected. President Hollande needs to make improvements.

There are two questions here. Is the EU’s word worth anything? Can they be trusted to carry out their own mandates? That question won’t be answered until the end of the month, when the Commission will attempt to give its final answer regarding the French budget.

The other question is whether the French word has any value, whether it’s possible to rely on any contract France or a French entity might sign. That question seems clearly answered.