Posted by Thomas Krengel
on 06/22/09
(CBS) If you're planning to apply for a job with the city of Bozeman, Montana, be prepared to hand over much more than your references and résumé.
The Rocky Mountain city instructs all job applicants to divulge their usernames and passwords for "any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc."
"Before we offer people employment in a public trust position we have a responsibility to do a thorough background check," Chuck Winn, Bozeman's assistant city manager, told CBSNews.com in an interview on Thursday. "This is just a component of a thorough background check."
"Shame on us if there was information out there available about a person who applied for a job who was a child molester or had some sort of information out there on the Internet that kind of showed those propensities and we didn't look for it, we didn't ask, and we hired that person," Winn said. "In many ways we would have let the public down."
An attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group based in San Francisco, questioned Bozeman's choice to ask for usernames and passwords. "I think its indefensibly invasive and likely illegal as a violation of the First Amendment rights of job applicants," said Kevin Bankston, an EFF attorney. "Essentially they're conditioning your application for employment on your waiving your First Amendment rights ... and risking the security of your information by requiring you to share your password with them... Where does it stop? How about a photocopy of your diary?"
Interesting huh? Naturally we don't want criminals or deviants of any kind employed by our municipalities and give those offenders access to areas where they could potentially cause us a great deal of harm. And of course we are all proponents of throrough background checking and pre-hiring due diligence before offering anyone a position. That has always been good procedure and will continue to be.
But what do you think? Is the City of Bozeman entitled to do whatever their leadership deems necessary to ensure good hires or are they actually treading on applicants' First Amendment Rights in their zeal to weed out any undesirable applicants and actually doing more harm to the City in the long run?
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