He was looking for another line of work, according to news articles, and started. MUG shots have been online for years, but they appear to have become the basis for businesses in 2010, thanks to Craig Robert Wiggen, who served three years in federal prison for a scheme to lift credit card numbers from diners at a Tex-Mex restaurant in Tallahassee, Fla. “But should we shut down the entire database because there are presumably bad actors out there?” “What we have is a situation where people are doing controversial things with public records,” says Mark Caramanica, a director at the committee, a nonprofit organization based in Arlington, Va. That right was recently exercised by newspapers and Web sites around the world when the public got its first look at Aaron Alexis, the Navy Yard gunman, through a booking photograph from a 2010 arrest. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press argues that any restriction on booking photographs raises First Amendment issues and impinges on editors’ right to determine what is newsworthy. Utah prohibits county sheriffs from giving out booking photographs to a site that will charge to delete them.īut as legislators draft laws, they are finding plenty of resistance, much of it from journalists who assert that public records should be just that: public.
The governor of Oregon signed a bill this summer that gives such sites 30 days to take down the image, free of charge, of anyone who can prove that he or she was exonerated or whose record has been expunged. Some states, though, are looking for ways to curb them. The sites are perfectly legal, and they get financial oxygen the same way as other online businesses - through credit card companies and PayPal. In this case, the time was early 2011, when mug-shot Web sites started popping up to turn the most embarrassing photograph of anyone’s life into cash. It was only a matter of time before the Internet started to monetize humiliation. “But these Web sites are punishing me, and because I don’t have the money it would take to get my photo off them all, there is nothing I can do about it.” “I know what I did was wrong, and I understand the punishment,” he continued. “The assistant to this state rep called my friend back and said, ‘We’d like to hire him, but we Google every potential employee, and the first thing that came up when we searched for Maxwell was a mug shot for a drug arrest,’ ” Mr. Birnbaum heard about the job through a friend.
Birnbaum learned in his sophomore year, when he applied to be an intern for a state representative in Austin. But these pictures can cause serious reputational damage, as Mr. Mug shots are merely artifacts of an arrest, not proof of a conviction, and many people whose images are now on display were never found guilty, or the charges against them were dropped. Birnbaum, and millions of other Americans now captured on one or more of these sites, this sounds like extortion. Pay up, in other words, and the picture is deleted, at least from the site that was paid. That fee can be anywhere from $30 to $400, or even higher. That sounds civic-minded, until you consider one way most of these sites make money: by charging a fee to remove the image. The ostensible point of these sites is to give the public a quick way to glean the unsavory history of a neighbor, a potential date or anyone else. These companies routinely show up high in Google searches a week ago, the top four results for “Maxwell Birnbaum” were mug-shot sites. That’s because the mug shot from his arrest is posted on a handful of for-profit Web sites, with names like Mugshots, BustedMugshots and JustMugshots. Birnbaum online, the taint could last a very long time. In the eyes of anyone who searches for Mr. Which means that by the time he graduates from the University of Texas at Austin, he can start his working life without taint.Īt least in the eyes of the law.
Birnbaum later agreed to enter a multiyear, pretrial diversion program that has involved counseling and drug tests, as well as visits to Alabama every six months to update a judge on his progress.īut once he is done, Mr. Birnbaum’s knapsack, and he was handcuffed and placed under arrest. Birnbaum’s who quickly regretted his decision - said yes.
When an officer asked if he could search the vehicle, the driver - a fraternity brother of Mr. As they neared their destination, the police pulled the van over, citing a faulty taillight. IN March last year, a college freshman named Maxwell Birnbaum was riding in a van filled with friends from Austin, Tex., to a spring-break rental house in Gulf Shores, Ala.