Around town:

By the time you read this, the Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeal will have heard oral argument on Dec. 5 on a grass-roots lawsuit by Jet Propulsion Laboratory employees to protect their right to privacy.

The lawsuit, Nelson vs. NASA, was filed by 28 JPL employees. It challenges JPL’s implementation of a Homeland Security directive. The directive, known as HSPD 12, was signed by President Bush in August 2004. It requires “secure and reliable forms of identification issued by the Federal Government to its employees and contractors.”

This is not a litigious group of plaintiffs. They are all senior JPL employees with 20 to 30 years of employment. They are engineers and scientists with stellar records in their fields. They do not object to the goals of HSPD 12 and they note that they already have secure and reliable forms of identification — their JPL badges, passports, birth records and drivers licenses.

The lawsuit challenges the following release:

I authorize any investigator, special agent, or other duly accredited representative of the authorized Federal agency conducting my background investigation, to obtain any information relating to my activities from schools, residential management agents, employers, criminal justice agencies, retail business establishments, or other sources of information. This information may include, but is not limited to, my academic, residential, achievement, performance attendance, disciplinary, employment history, and criminal history record information.

Additional language in the release permits JPL to disclose the information “to the news media or the general public” if “in the public interest” if it “would not constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”

Most of the plaintiffs work on projects which do not require security clearances. They contend that JPL’s implementation of HSPD 12 is overboard because this open-ended release would permit investigators from any federal agency to access any record, and to question any person — physicians, psychologists, friends, family, and acquaintances — about any subject, including medical treatment, financial, past and present employment, sex and finances. Right now, implementation of the release is temporarily stayed by order of the Ninth Circuit.

These 28 plaintiffs have much at stake. Their refusal to sign the release will be treated, not as a firing, but as a voluntary resignation. Their argument is simple: “To keep the jobs we have held proficiently for years and even decades, we are now being required to authorize excessive and open-ended investigations into intimate details of our personal lives.”

ANITA SUSAN BRENNER is a longtime La Cañada resident. You may e-mail her at anitasusan.brenner@ yahoo.com. She invites you to read the JPL release forms, the appellate briefs and court opinions at http://hspd12jpl.org/ lawsuit.html.