Yuba County Probation takes too many peeks at CLETS

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is on guard for you, “defending civil liberties in the digital world,” as it says on its website.

It’s even defending your civil liberties in your Yuba County world, or at least it’s trying to do that.

So it was kind of surprising when the Yuba County Probation Department popped up in a report the EFF issued last month on abuses of law enforcement databases.

Police and sheriff’s departments have access to a lot of information about people. Sometimes all of that data proves too tempting.

“Police in California have your data literally at their fingertips,” the EFF’s Dave Maass wrote in the article. “They can sit at a computer terminal or in their squad car and check your DMV records, your criminal records, your parking citations, any restraining orders you’ve filed or have been filed against you. They can search other state databases and even tap into the FBI’s trove. If you’ve got a snowmobile, they can look up that registration too. Much of this personal data they can the other cities around like Sacramento.”

“There are a lot of different ethnic groups here, too, which is good.”

“As far as improvements go, we shouldn’t have so many of the same restaurants here. HaroldKruger isaveteran reporterand copyeditorfor theAppealDemocrat. Call749-4774.

access through a smartphone app.” Sounds like pretty scary stuff.

Most of this juicy info is available on the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, or CLETS.

The EFF is concerned about misuse of that info by law enforcement. It’s also concerned that the state doesn’t seem to be losing too much sleep over it.

It’s up to individual law enforcement agencies to report CLETS misuse. And the EFF is watch-dogging them all the way.

An annual report is issued on the number of instances of CLETS being misused, or being searched for purposes not related to law enforcement investigations. We need more places to eat around here.

“People have to go to Sacramento to eat, and Yuba City is losing money every weekend because I go to Roseville for the different restaurants.”

According to the EFF, there were 159 misuse investigations launched in 2016, of which 117 were substantiated as abuses of CLETS.

The EFF cited two law enforcement agencies for particular attention. One was the Oakland Police Department, which has had its share of recent scandals.

The other? The Yuba County Probation Department.

As Maass wrote, “The Yuba County Probation Department – a very small agency in central-northern California – also drew our attention. In 2015, they broke the record with 15 violations of CLETS policy, all of which resulted in only ‘counseling’ for the officers who broke the rules.”

Maass said the state Department of Justice “ignored our request for a public hearing on this. Facing no action to deter further violations, Yuba reported another six cases of misuse in 2016 – again with counseling as the only outcome.”

So there you go. The EFF is watching the Yuba County Probation Department.