Personal Data for the Taking
David Scull for The New York Times
A class at Johns Hopkins was able to build detailed dossiers on Baltimore citizens using only public databases.
|
Published: May 18, 2005
|
|
|
|
1. |
|
2. |
|
3. |
|
4. |
|
5. |
|
|
|
|
|
(Page 2 of 2) Like
any other American, Mr. Albright deposited these tidbits in various
databases as he conducted the routine transactions- voting, buying a
house, donating money to a campaign - and they became public records.
As more of those records are made available on the Internet (a
Government Accountability Office study last November estimated that as
many as 28 percent of county governments now make public records
available online), anyone with Internet access, anywhere in the world,
can dig them up. "I think what this professor and students have
done is a powerful object lesson in just how much information there is
to be found about most of us online," said Beth Givens, director of the
Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego, "and how difficult it is,
how impossible it is, to control what's done with our information." Journalists,
private investigators, law enforcement officials and others who gather
background information on individuals for a living tend to view as a
boon the migration of public records databases to the Internet, as well
as the combination of those records at one-stop shops like ChoicePoint
and LexisNexis, which is owned by Reed Elsevier. But some
privacy advocates are arguing that ease of access has a downside, too.
Social Security numbers, they say, remain easy to come by, particularly
in the thousands of public documents now being scanned and made
available online. Social Security numbers present a particular threat
because they are the primary identifiers that let thieves open credit
lines, apply for loans or otherwise pose as another person. Betty
Ostergren, a former insurance claims supervisor in Virginia, has become
an expert in digging up scanned documents and other information from
local government Web sites around the country. "I don't want these records on the Internet," said Ms. Ostergren, whose Web site, the Virginia Watchdog (www.opcva.com/watchdog),
documents her efforts, complete with defiant instructions on how to
find sensitive information on public officials. "I hate to do it," she
said, "but I'm trying to get my point across." That includes the
Social Security numbers and signatures of the director of central
intelligence, Porter J. Goss, and his wife. They can be found in
records made available on a county court Web site in Florida. David
Bloys, a private investigator in Texas, is equally concerned. He has
helped draft a bill now before the Texas Legislature that would
prohibit the bulk transfer and display over the Internet of documents
filed with local government. There are real dangers involved,
Mr. Bloys said, when such information "migrates from practical
obscurity inside the four walls of the courthouse to widespread
dissemination, aggregation and export across the world via the
Internet." However convenient online access has made things for
legitimate users, the information is equally convenient for "stalkers,
terrorists and identity thieves," he said. The bill, introduced
in Austin by Representative Carl Isett, a Republican, was unanimously
approved by the State Affairs Committee on May 3, but did not make the
deadline for a House vote. A spokesman said Mr. Isett was seeking to
amend another bill with language from his proposal. And just
two weeks ago in Alaska, the American Civil Liberties Union - a strong
advocate of openness and access to public documents - took up the cause
of Maryjane Hinman, a nurse who had lobbied unsuccessfully to have her
home address removed from the state's online registry of occupational
licenses. "We feel that open access to public records is key to
a free society," said Jason Brandeis, the A.C.L.U. lawyer handling the
suit, which seeks to bar Alaska from disseminating contact information
for licensed nurses. "But a balance needs to be struck between the
public interest in open access to government information, and the need
to protect individual privacy." Whether such a balance can ever
be achieved when so much information is already available is an open
question. And some people are troubled by recent trends against access.
"I have no problem with an individual who faces unusual threats
from publication of her identity or identifying details being able
under the law to seek special exception from openness," said Rebecca
Daugherty, the director of the Freedom of Information Service Center
for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Virginia. "But
the secrecy should be the exception not the rule." Several Johns
Hopkins students came to a similar conclusion. Despite their surprise
at the number of records they could amass and combine, many still felt
that the benefits of openness outweighed the risks. "If some
citizen is concerned about dead people remaining registered to vote, he
can simply obtain the database of deaths and the voter registration
database and cross-correlate," said 21-year-old Joshua Mason, whose
group discovered 1,500 dead people listed as active registered voters.
Fifty of those dead people somehow voted in the last election. "The
problem is, we don't know what we want," Dr. Rubin said, referring to
the competing social interests in openness and privacy. "It is
clear that there are strong negative consequences to being able to
collect and correlate all this information on people," he said, "but it
is also possible that the consequences to personal freedom would be
worse if it were outlawed."
|