With great fanfare last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials announced the arrest of some 3,000 convicted "criminal aliens" during a its seven-day national "Operation Cross-Check" enforcement operations.
They can help create registries that allow sellers to cross check law enforcement lists.
In the absence of mandates for data sharing or publication, research funding agencies should give greater scrutiny to data sharing plans referred to in their policy documents and check their enforcement.
The president starts with background checks; better enforcement of existing laws; and an assault weapons and high-capacity magazine ban.
The co-defendants include a former police detective, Mark Arneson, who admitted illegally checking law enforcement databases hundreds of times for Mr. Pellicano; a former phone company worker, Rayford Turner, accused of helping him set up wiretaps; and a computer programmer, Kevin Kachikian, who admitted to helping design and build his wiretap system.
The court, however, left intact the part of the law which requires that law enforcement check the immigration status of anyone detained or arrested, which has led to allegations of racial profiling.
Last May, during a routine code enforcement check, the town's building inspector discovered that the catering hall was operating without a public assembly license, required for any business where large gatherings are held.
"We are obviously disappointed with the result," he said, "and we continue to believe that public access to these types of court records would provide a valuable check on law enforcement agencies and on the courts".
An article on Saturday about the continuing investigation of the celebrity private investigator Anthony Pellicano referred incorrectly to a plea by Mark Arneson, a former Los Angeles police officer whom Mr. Pellicano is accused of having bribed to check confidential law enforcement databases.
Shortly after the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., that killed 20 children in December, there seemed to be momentum in the Senate for a bill requiring a universal background check, which law enforcement officials say would go hand in hand with enhanced penalties for straw purchases because it would help identify more criminals and mentally ill people who seek to buy guns.
Noah Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School, argued last week that, because "the only legally binding check on law enforcement is the authority of the judiciary to say what the law is," a President who blocks the courts from sanctioning a sheriff who intentionally defies the law "is breaking the basic structure of the legal order".
