14 DAY TRIAL // For the past year and a half, Eric Rachner, a former security analyst at Microsoft, who currently works as an independent security consultant, has been trying to prove that Seattle police officers unlawfully arrested him for refusal to provide an ID. Through his insistent probing the researcher might have uncovered a way for others to prove that their civil rights were similarly violated.
A Saturday night in October 2008 found over twenty inebriated computer geeks, including Rachner and world-renowned security researcher Dan Kaminsky, playing a game of urban golf on the streets of Seattle. However, their apparently harmless drunken fun ended prematurely when a passer-by got hit in the face with a Styrofoam ball and called 911.
When Michele Letizia, one of four police officers responding to the scene, asked Rachner to identify himself, the researcher declined to comply and instead pointed to the location of his wallet. Letizia refused to take the wallet and inspect it for an ID and threatened the researcher to arrest him for obstruction if he does not comply with the request.
Rachner remained strong on his position, while being aware of a 1982 Washington Supreme Court ruling according to which arresting a person solely for withholding identification is unconstitutional. The police officer eventually went ahead and arrested the security researcher, citing refusal to provide ID as reason in the official report.
Rachner spent two hours in arrest before being released and made aware that charges against him will be brought through the Prosecuting Attorney's Office. The computer expert hired a lawyer and prepared to go to trial, only to have the charges against him dropped in May 2009. But because Rachner is constantly subjected to background checks by his customers, due to his job as a penetration tester, he wanted his record scrubbed of any mention of the incident.
At this point, the researcher had already been denied two requests for the arrest recordings taken with the squad car video camera and microphones attached to officers' uniforms. However, as the case was no longer pending, he filed a third request under the state's public information disclosure legislation.
According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, who reported on the story, the city's police department responded with: "These recordings are both past our retention period and can no longer be obtained. Please note that the majority of 911 calls and videos are retained for a period of ninety (90) days."
This didn't satisfy Rachner, who being a technology geek, started going through the recording system's documentation, procured from the manufacturer. That's when he discovered that logs showing when a recording has been uploaded, viewed, deleted or tagged for prolonged storage, should be kept.
Therefore, he asked for the system logs corresponding to his arrest's recordings, which to his surprise, showed that the recordings were not deleted and had instead been flagged for retention. Eventually, the police produced the "missing" files, along with an explanation that they were previously lost due to server failure and it took time to recover them.
"There is absolutely nothing in the activity log to support that claim. Moreover, if the video was unavailable, it was dishonest of them to claim the video could no longer be obtained because it was past the 90-day retention period. It is completely at odds with what they told me in writing," commented Rachner for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Lembhard Howell, a Seattle-based civil rights attorney, told the local newspaper that he was given the 90-day excuse before too and he is happy to learn, thanks to Rachner, that there should be logs showing what happened to police recordings.
Computer cryptologist David Hulton was one of the three urban golfers arrested that night. He was charged with assault, after apparently being erroneously identified as the one who shot the foam ball that hit the victim in the face. The charges against him were also dropped, but he now helps Rachner pay for his attorney in an effort to uncover similar potentially unlawful arrests. Dan Kaminsky described the events that took place that night, when more than twenty people, including himself, were detained and IDed over a Styrofoam ball, that caused little more than a sting, as "ridiculous."
