Worcester County residents lose phone-record privacy bid

Four Worcester County residents lost their bid to keep a privacy challenge alive after the First Circuit said they had not shown concrete, imminent harm from the Massachusetts State Police’s phone-record system. The case also names Superintendent Geoffrey D. Noble, in his official capacity, and several private companies tied to the system.

That makes the ruling about access to court, not the merits of the privacy claim. The panel said the plaintiffs described a troubling practice, but not the kind of concrete and imminent harm that federal judges require before a lawsuit can move forward.

A privacy claim without enough personal harm

The residents said state police officers had secretly recorded phone conversations with civilians and stored them in an online database. The superintendent moved to dismiss on several grounds, including sovereign immunity and standing, but the district court only partly agreed. The First Circuit said the complaint still stayed too general and too backward-looking to support the forward-looking relief the plaintiffs were seeking.

The panel said the plaintiffs did not allege that they had been convicted because of the recordings, that charges were pending when they sued, or that a new prosecution was certainly around the corner. Without that sort of specific, imminent injury, the court said, they could not keep pressing their claim against the superintendent in federal court. The decision narrows one route for challenging police surveillance or data-sharing systems when the alleged harm is hard to pin to a single person at a single moment.