Your papers, please.

On May 21,2002, Larry Hiibel was standing next to his pickup truck near Winnemucca, Nevada, when he was approached by a police officer who demanded to see some identification. After Hiibel, exercising the "right to remain silent," simply ignored the officer's directive, he was handcuffed and taken to jail. The arresting officer insisted that because Hiibel was "potentially" involved in criminal activity, he was required to obey the order to present identification. A trial court found him guilty of "delaying" a police officer; he was never charged with any other offense.

In December 2002, the Nevada State Supreme Court upheld Hiibel's conviction. The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review the case, with oral arguments scheduled for March. A concurring opinion in the 2002 Nevada State Supreme Court decision insisted that law enforcement officers must be able to demand identification papers from any citizen in order to deal with "the dangers presented by the war against domestic and international terrorism." This elevates the Hiibel case into a matter worthy of national concern.

After all, one could reason, if the federal government can wage an unprovoked "pre-emptive" war against Iraq, why couldn't the federal government--or state and local officials acting on its behalf--invoke the "war on terror" to pre-emptively imprison any American seeking to defend his personal autonomy and privacy? And, just as Hiibel was described as "potentially" involved in criminal activity, couldn't millions of presently law-abiding Americans be accused of being "potentially" involved in terrorism?

Furthermore, as commentator Brian Doherty pointed out in a March 9 Los Angeles Times column, the Hiibel precedent takes on a much more ominous meaning now that the "war on terror" has spawned "the rise of a seemingly endless number of computerized databases."

"Police now potentially have at their disposal such databases as the National Criminal Information Center (which the Justice Department exempted from requirements that it be 'timely, relevant, complete and accurate') and the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange." The latter incorporates much of the data-mining capacity of the supposedly abandoned Total Information Awareness program.

"Demands that you identify yourself are creeping into situations well beyond roadside encounters with police," continues Doherty. "The Department of Homeland Security is rolling out its Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System II program, which will check data on all airline passengers against existing government and private databases to establish what threat level a traveler presents. This will potentially involve checking your credit records, gun ownership, magazine subscriptions, outstanding child-support obligations and any other information about you floating in the 'datasphere.'"

As the Electronic Privacy Information Center pointed out in an amicus brief, "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."