The Turducken Approach to Privacy Law / A Call to Clear the Tangled Thicket of Privacy Law : Via NYTimes.com > Privacy.

In June, the metaphor of the turducken made its first appearance in American jurisprudence.

“It’s a bit like building a dinosaur from a jawbone or skull fragment,” a dissenting federal appeals court judge wrote of his colleagues’ expansive reasoning, “and the result looks more like a turducken.”

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The dissenter was Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco. He is a master of the dissent that might as well be a petition for Supreme Court review of the majority’s decision. This one, protesting his court’s refusal to rehear a case about the privacy rights of employees, said the law in that area had become a tangled thicket.

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In 2004, a Bush administration domestic security initiative expanded the background checks required for many government jobs to include contract employees like those at the laboratory.

The plaintiffs say the government investigations are needlessly intrusive and violate their privacy rights. They suggested that the federal government should have learned something from how it treated an earlier generation of scientists, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the effort to develop the atomic bomb during World War II and was later stripped of his security clearance in the McCarthy era.

“We see history repeating itself,” Dr. Nelson said. “These guys went to leftist meetings in the ’30s, did heroic science in the ’40s and were persecuted in the ’50s.”

Dr. Nelson, who has been with the laboratory for 30 years, works on the Cassini mission, which involves a spacecraft orbiting Saturn. He and other plaintiffs do not have security clearances and are not involved in classified or military activities.

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Dr. Nelson, who has been with the laboratory for 30 years, works on the Cassini mission, which involves a spacecraft orbiting Saturn. He and other plaintiffs do not have security clearances and are not involved in classified or military activities.

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Much of what the laboratory’s employees were asked to disclose was indeed perfectly ordinary. But they were also asked about drug use and counseling, and they were required to sign a form authorizing the government to collect information from schools, landlords, employers and others.

That additional information was to be sought through another form, this one soliciting “adverse information,” including “violations of the law,” “financial integrity,” “abuse of alcohol and/or drugs” and “mental or emotional stability.” There was also a space on the form for a little essay that invited “derogatory as well as positive information.”

It is not clear how the government was to use the information it gathered. But a document briefly posted on an internal Web site at the laboratory said employees might be deemed unsuitable for, among many other things, loitering, homosexuality, illegal gambling, mutilation of public records, “indecent proposal,” “black market activities (nonprofit),” “carnal knowledge” and “sodomy.” The document is available on a Web site about the suit created by the plaintiffs.

The government has neither confirmed nor disavowed that last document, and there is no indication that the criteria it listed were ever used. In the trial court, Vesper Mei, a government lawyer, said anything to do with the topic was “premature and speculative.” In its Supreme Court brief, the government said it had made no “determinations based on improper factors.”

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