Dumpster diving and Huckabee

I'm amused that once Mike Huckabee became the front runner in the Iowa Republican caucuses, he took to using the phrase "dumpster diving" to describe the research his opponents were doing on him. Here's how Huckabee said it last month on Larry King Live:

There's a lot of political dumpster diving that goes on in the campaign. There are people from campaigns going back to my hometown of Hope. They're all over Little Rock. They're looking for any dirt they can find. And usually they'll find it.

Dumpster diving is typically used to describe how the down-and-out and the excessively thrifty sift through others' trash in the hunt for useful and edible things. The former Arkansas governor, however, was invoking its less well-known use as an investigative tool.

Police and private detectives have long seized the trash of the unwitting to gather evidence. Old bank bills, letters, receipts found between the banana peels and snot rags are all manna to the investigator on the hunt for clues. Even better, you don't need a search warrant.

The New York Times reported recently that dumpster diving played a crucial role in exposing Balco's role in the steroid scandal. CBS News has called it a tool for corporate spies. Computer Weekly says it's a way to screen new IT staff. Oracle's CEO once defended using it to gather information on Microsoft. Procter & Gamble has acknowledged its hired hands once picked through the rubbish of Unilever, a hair-care product rival. A magazine for trial lawyers has even recommended it as a strategy in trade disputes.

All draw sanction from a 1988 U.S. Supreme Court case, California v. Greenwood, in which six justices ruled that the police did not violate a defendant's constitutional rights by secretly taking his trash from the curb in front of his house. The police used it to charge him and a friend with drug crimes. The justices opined:

It is common knowledge that plastic garbage bags left along a public street are readily accessible to animals, children, scavengers, snoops, and other members of the public. Moreover, respondents placed their refuse at the curb for the express purpose of conveying it to a third party, the trash collector, who might himself have sorted through it or permitted others, such as the police, to do so. The police cannot reasonably be expected to avert their eyes from evidence of criminal activity that could have been observed by any member of the public.

Two dissenting justices had a different view:

Scrutiny of another's trash is contrary to commonly accepted notions of civilized behavior.

I don't know that any of Huckabee's opponents have actually sorted through his trash. I haven't read of any evidence of that, nor read of any proof offered by Huckabee. Huckabee, however, is certainly playing off the outrage that would ensue if they did. Otherwise, why not call it "in-depth investigation" or "opposition research" or some other more neutral term? Huckabee's implying that there's something unsavory about researching his past, whereas its seems like a perfectly reasonable strategy to me when the presidency of the United States is at stake.

Reporters, naturally, have also yielded to the temptations of the dumpster.

Investigative reporter Jack Anderson's associates once acquired J. Edgard Hoover's trash, so reported Time magazine, and "confirmed that he liked to drink Jack Daniels." Mark Feldstein, a former Anderson intern, wrote in the Washington Monthly that Anderson "rifled through Hoover's trash (including his dog's feces), largely because Anderson thought Hoover had gotten too powerful and needed to be put in his place."

A footnote in California v. Greenwood referred to a 1975 incident in which "a reporter for a weekly tabloid seized five bags of garbage from the sidewalk outside the home of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger." That reporter, Jay Gourley, who once wrote for the Kentucky Post and at the time worked for the National Enquirer, got other journalists clucking. Here's Howard Flieger in the July 28, 1975 issue of U.S. News and World Report:

To go combing through the junk of any household in search of private - and irrelevant - remnants of a family's living habits is just about as far removed from serious investigative pursuits as it is possible to get.

It makes anyone who has devoted a lifetime to journalism, and regards it as a vital and honorable service to public enlightenment, want to get into a hot tub and scrub with a strong soap until it hurts.

My favorite incident, though, involved Portland's Willamette Week. Outraged that the Portland police brought charges against a fellow police officer based on evidence they found in her trash, reporters for the alternative newsweekly went out and grabbed the trash of the district attorney, police chief and mayor. They wrote that they wanted to "make a point about how invasive a 'garbage pull' really is--and to highlight the government's ongoing erosion of people's privacy":

There is something about poking through someone else's garbage that makes you feel dirty, and it's not just the stench and the flies. Scrap by scrap, we are reverse-engineering a grimy portrait of another human being, reconstituting an identity from his discards, probing into stuff that is absolutely, positively none of our damn business.

It's one thing to revel in the hallowed tradition of muckraking. It's another to get down on your hands and knees and nose through wads of someone else's Kleenex. Is this why our parents sent us to college? So we could paw through orange peels and ice-cream tubs and half-eaten loaves of bread?

Maybe so, if it's the difference between winning or losing in New Hampshire.