The publishing of the names and addresses of local gunowners by the Westchester Journal News in December, http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/01/02/newspaper-decision-to-out-gun-owners-sparks-all-out-battle/, was, to put it mildly controversial. It has led to a lot of strong reactions in large part as far as I could tell driven by one’s position on the Second Amendment of the Constitution relating to the rights of citizens to own firearms.
I am not, at least in this short set of comments, taking any position regarding the Second Amendment. In the interests of complete disclosure, I do not own a gun, do not plan to buy a gun, and only fired anything when I was in basic training at Ft. Dix, many (many) years ago. I am not enough of a Constitutional expert to know whether there are enough comma’s in the Second Amendment or not.
When I was the CIO at the US Department of Transportation, there was a lot of emphasis over the protection of what we referred to as Personally Identifiable Information (PII). This was information which when released would provide sufficiently information to allow someone to be able to identify who the person was, where they lived, what and/or where their financial or health information was kept or was, and so on.
This concern lead for example to policies put in place by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) while I was in Government to decrease as much as practical the use of social security numbers to identify individuals. We invested significant resources into tracking and managing any databases which contained PII and went to great lengths to keep them protected.
It seems to me that this is the more fundamental issue associated with the request by the Westchester Journal News, and other news organizations, not the Second Amendment. The question is whether it is appropriate for the Government to release databases which contain PII which was collected for Government purposes. In general, it seems to me the answer is no except in extraordinary and explicitly authorized situations, e.g. sex offender registries come to mind as an example of an exception or other situations where laws were explicitly broken as determined in a court of law.
Otherwise the normative decision, in my opinion, should be one where privacy concerns dominate the decision process. As with the First Amendment, Freedom of Speech, these kinds of rights need to be protected especially when faced with uncomfortable situations. That is why these protections exist.