The following is an editorial by Joseph W. McQuaid, Publisher of the New Hampshire Union Leader:
The people of New Hampshire should know that their state government is using — in our view misusing — something called the “Driver Privacy Act” to prevent them from finding out what their public servants are doing on public roads, in public vehicles, on the public’s time.
This is an outrageous Big Brother overreach, and Gov. John Lynch ought to be moving to stop it instead of having the Attorney General’s Office defend it.
State police and the Department of Safety are now refusing to make public the records and investigative reports of highway accidents involving on-duty state and local police, under the claim that they must protect the “privacy” of those drivers.
As both our newspaper and the Portsmouth Herald have argued in separate court actions, that is not what the Driver Privacy Act was intended for. It was meant to shield personal information of private citizens, such as Social Security numbers and addresses.
Read more of the editorial in the New Hampshire Union Leader.