Thank the civil rights movement for your privacy

Civil libertarians have been celebrating the recent holding by a federal appellate court that you and I can’t be arrested simply for refusing to identify ourselves to police. As it turns out, the case has many layers, and the deeper we dig, the more important the win.

The contretemps began when a former automobile mechanic named George Wingate III pulled his car to the side of a Virginia highway one night and popped the hood to try to figure out why the check engine light was on. A sheriff’s deputy stopped to see whether he could help, but when Wingate refused to show identification and repeatedly asked whether he was being detained or was free to leave, the deputy called for backup. He wound up in handcuffs, charged with, among other things, violating a county ordinance requiring people to identify themselves to police.

The charges were soon dropped. Wingate then filed suit, claiming that his civil rights had been violated. The trial court ruled for the officers, but earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held that Wingate’s lawsuit can proceed to trial.

From one perspective, the decision might be read as simply a further and quite useful elucidation of the tricky issue of when we do and do not have to comply with the orders of law enforcement. That alone would be worth noting — and celebrating. But two other ways of looking at the case bear mention.

First, the case provides an example of the general right to be left alone. The much-praised right to privacy has long struck me as a subset of the right to move anonymously through life.

To take a current controversy, the standoff between Apple and Facebook over the former’s plan to make it harder for app-makers to monetize their users has largely been presented as a battle over the right to privacy. But it makes more sense to consider the tussle as involving the user’s anonymity, the ability to travel the web without leaving advertisers a digital trail.

Seen this way, the issue dividing the tech giants isn’t all that different from whether we have the right to drive along the street without leaving a trail of identifying images captured by traffic cameras — also an affront against the right to anonymity, if by anonymity we mean not being forced, as the price of living our daily lives, to constantly tell others who we are.

All of which leads us to the second striking aspect of the Fourth Circuit’s opinion: The court makes no reference to Wingate’s race. When the lawsuit was filed, the press reported it as a challenge to arrests for “driving while Black.” The court of appeals omitted that detail.

Now you’re thinking that I’ve committed what journalists call burying the lede. But it’s notable that the court found a way to decide the case without reference to discrimination. Often we do damage to the cause of truth when we ignore the racial shadings of controversies that come before the courts. But now and then a case thought to be about race becomes a springboard for a ruling about the breadth of personal freedom.

Wingate’s lawsuit is like that. It’s a reminder of the many ways in which the Black freedom struggle has enhanced the rights not only of racial minorities but of all Americans. Indeed, to take us full circle, today’s legal debate over the right to remain anonymous has its genesis in the NAACP v. Alabama, a 1958 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court holding that a state cannot force an organization accused of no wrongdoing to turn over membership lists.

Everyone knew that NAACP v. Alabama was about racial oppression, but the Supreme Court wrote an opinion of broader application. The suffering of Black people that led the nation to recall and celebrate the fundamental democratic value of allowing association without identification.

Strange but true: There turns out to be a link between the right to remain unidentified in politics, the right not to be arrested for refusing to hand over an ID card, and the right to drive unmolested while Black. All involve the often-overlooked value of living the anonymous life.