We all know the Governor wants to limit employers' access to the criminal records of present and potential employees. It's a reasonable argument in its own context but in this age of people using Google to screen potential suitors, it seems a little naive.

Take this for example. Or this. More and more people are researching and posting crime reports to the internet. An arrest report is a public record. Under Massachusetts law, local police are mandated to keep a chronological log with the name of people who have been arrested and to make the log available to the public. But under CORI the listing of arrestees can't be alphabetical or, and this is where the gray area comes in, indexed in any way.

...provided that no alphabetical or similar index of criminal defendants is available to the public, directly or indirectly. ...

The problem is that the internet is a giant index of public information including arrests of criminal defendants. (So in Massachusetts, one could argue, the internet is illegal.) Obviously the law was designed for an earlier time when paper documents and file cabinets were the norm.

Perversely, under the Governor's proposed plan, an employer could conceivably use the web to find out if a potential employee was arrested but restricted in finding out if he or she was found not guilty in court.