Know when to fold ’em
The politicians who have taken New York City to court over its plans to destroy copies of personal documents used to grant its municipal ID card are wasting their time. Assembly Members Nicole Malliotakis and Ron Castorina filed suit after Mayor de Blasio got on his anti-Trump soapbox and threatened to shred the materials lest they fall into the hands of a President who might use them to deport illegal immigrants en masse, including in so-called sanctuary cities.
But de Blasio’s dramatics aside, this is not some massive tug-of-war between the feds and city government, nor is it about the high principle of preserving public records under freedom of information law.
The mayor and the city are actually just following the very clear letter of the law passed in mid-2014, before the useful card found its way into the hands of a million New Yorkers.
That statute leaves no doubt: For the first two years of the program, copies of especially sensitive personal records collected to determine eligibility — passports, birth certificates and the like — shall be held for 24 months, then, every quarter, purged to safeguard confidentiality and guard against data breaches.
And two years in, says the same law, it will be the city’s responsibility to review policy and determine how long, going forward, newly collected documents would be held, if at all.
Which the city did — and concluded that “there is no need to retain copies of records” after the ID is issued or denied.
That determination was consistent with the basic bargain used to get privacy-protective New Yorkers, including otherwise undocumented immigrants, to sign up for the cards in the first place.
Contrary to claims by Malliotakis and Castorina — in attempts to convince a judge this week, he histrionically invoked the slaughter of 9/11 — none of this will create security problems. Even as it destroys sensitive underlying documents, the city will keep a database with all the basic information needed to make the cards — photographs, addresses, and the like — in order to, say, determine, say, whether or a card is legitimate or reissue a lost card.
In fact, if there’s a serious security risk, it likely falls on the other side of the ledger: “Anything that lives on a server can and will be breached,” NYPD anti-terror chief John Miller testified.
Drop the suit.