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I thought I would point out two things to everyone under the law. The first, and most important, is that the law on confidentiality only applies to government employees. When government records are considered confidential, it means government employees cannot reveal them. Anyone else who manages to get the information, either legally or illegally, may make it public without suffering a penalty. Think of the recent uproar about the pentagon papers being posted on the internet on wikileaks. The private who leaked the papers to wikileaks is in jail pending charges related to espionage. The owner of wikileaks is free and clear. If this applies to military secrets, it certainly applies to CHLs.

Second, and important more for comfort to some people, is that leaking CHL data is a crime in Texas. And yes, it does have a specified punishment. You have to know how to cross reference different codes to find it, but the Public Information Act is in chapter 552 of the Government Code. Section 552.101 says that any information considered confidential under the law is excepted from public disclosure. Section 552.352 says that releasing confidential information is a crime punishable by six months in jail, a $1000, fine, or both. This makes it a class B misdemeanor and it could be a different count for each person's information that is released.

chasfm11 wrote:Let's suppose that I'm in NM and have been pulled over for a traffic stop. Can the NM LEO pull the TCIC? I know that he/she should be able to pull the NCIC. I'm assuming that the TCIC would display protective orders, etc. in addition to the CHL.

The TCIC would display that information but it is not available outside the state of Texas. The NM officer would get his information through the NMCIC (or whatever they decided to call it). They would not see the warrants, CHL, or protective orders from Texas.

If the NM LEO cannot pull TCIC, how else would they know about an active warrant against me by a local municipality? No, I don't have anything like that, I'm just asking. Let's suppose that it is a bench warrant for a traffic fine that I didn't pay. Again, I'm just curious.

The reason these warrants are not shown is that it is illegal to extradite you across state lines for a misdemeanor warrant. So, municipal fines, even county court warrants for unlawfully carrying, are not enforceable outside the state. As a technicality, a person arrested on a felony warrant out of state must have the original jurisdiction agree to extradite through the courts. Many cases are pending because the PD does not have the money to go very far outside the state (for example, Luling has a case pending against a suspected rapist. He is known to be living in Tennessee right now, but the city does not have the money to extradite from further than one state away. So, he is living his life and just knows not to come back anywhere near Texas. Many warrants are entered into NCIC with notes on where the PD will extradite from, and he cannot be arrested if the warrant says only bordering states and he is further than that.

Sorry to get this way, but warrants and out of state information get very tricky with laws on verifying extradition, what offenses are allowed, time limits for each communication, etc.

Jim,

There are many ways to have CHL information show up on a background check legally, even if the information is confidential at the state level. The obvious one is CHL information that was gathered before the records were made confidential, but the other, less obvious common one is for the CHL holder to waive confidentiality. A third possibility, though i think it is unlikely, is that a gun range could sell the list of its customers, including the classes they took. Not definitive, but if a person took the CHL class, there is a good chance they went ahead and got a CHL.

This second one is more common than people realize. Just the fact that we talk about it on this board allows the public to know we have CHL's. It may take some work to tie some screen names to the real person, but the superdatabases commercially used can do it. Data mining is a rapidly growing field, where lots of seemingly miscellaneous data is collected and then the computers sort it to try to put related data together. I remember being taught about this in military security classes back in the 70's, and the computers we have now make it much easier.

Think how many times we have posted on this forum that someone used a CHL as a secondary, or even primary if they did not have their other, ID for some reason. Banks and stores have no legal obligation to not reveal this information that we willingly provide. If they wrote it down somewhere, it got stored in a database, and there is a good chance that it made its way into one of the commercial databases investigators use for background checks.

And, as Jester pointed out, it really depends on who runs the background check and why. PD's are not supposed to do it for schools, but many have done it anyway. I did not think this was what the OP meant since it was a coworker that ran background checks, but it is possible he goes through the PD.