California Court Posts SSNs, Medical Records

Lucas123 writes "California's Riverside County Superior Court's Web site is serving up document images containing SSNs and detailed medical records relating to civil cases, according to a couple of privacy advocates. All of the documents are free to anyone who knows where to look for them. 'Searches done on the court's Web site turned up various documents related to civil cases that contained sensitive information. Included were complete tax filings, medical reports pertaining to cases handled by the court, and images of checks complete with signatures as well as account and bank-routing numbers.'"

For those of you who know of anyone who's a victim

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Call each credit bureau and put a freeze on your credit. The credit bureaus will say they'll contact the others but they never do. You can do it anyway even if you're not a victim of identity theft but they'll charge anywhere from $10-$20 per credit bureau.

2. You are entitled to at least ONE free credit report per year and depending on your state maybe more. Federal trade Commision's site [ftc.gov] is the ONLY truly free credit report. Those other sites are trying to sell you other stuff and they're not on the up and up.

3. Check ALL of your bank and credit card statements every month.

4. Any fishyness, file a police report (they won't do anything about it because they have "more important things to do"). That way you'll have a legal document stating that this has happened.

5. Contact a lawyer to see what you can do to penalize such incompetence.

That's why some courts redact such information

[davidwr]

In some courts, "public" information is routinely redacted. You have to get a court order or be someone special to see the originals.

This also applies to evidence in criminal cases too. If I defraud 10 people's bank accounts at ACME Bank, those account numbers may be redacted depending on the court and whether the accounts are still active. If I'm on trial for k1dd13 p0rn or stealing nuclear secrets you can bet the main evidence will be sealed from public view.

Court Information is public record

[PhreakOfTime]

While it is unfortunate that such things as SSN's are being made public, the hard reality is that anything contained in a court record is public information.

Open access to government is a two way street, and is meant to prevent corruption and give the public a clear view what their government is doing.

On a side note, my county also publishes court records on the internet that are public information. However, it is limited to the court schedule, case#, charge, and attorney schedule.

The fact that this schedule is public information is still not a concept some people are aware of. Ive heard stories from court employees of upset people coming in and demanding that their DUI case be taken down from being publicly viewable. Unfortunately for these people, the law says otherwise.

I even have personal experience in some of the reactions people have to this publicly available information after I posted a link to the county courthouse on one of my websites. A Company called Caton Commercial [willcounty...tcourt.com] even went to far as to have their attorney draft a cease and desist letter threatening me with legal action, and demanding that I remove this linked information, and turn over my legal domains to them to stop this 'knowingly libelous' action. Although, Im not sure that they thought through how they were going to present to a judge their case that the courts own website schedule was the source of this so-called libelous information. Like every other company before that has failed to grasp the concept of the internet, all the attention this brought to the linked information was a lovely demonstration of the 'Streisand Effect'. Once again, adding more weight to the phrase 'more dollars than sense'.

Violation of federal law:

[Rageon]

I can't imagine this will last long, as it's a clear violation of federal law. I work for a court, and we ALWAYS need to redact SSN from every order (unless it's just being disclosed to that specific person). It's against state law here, but also federal. From 42 U.S.C. 405(c)(2)(C)(viii):

Social security account numbers and related records that are obtained or maintained by authorized persons pursuant to any provision of law enacted on or after October 1, 1990, shall be confidential, and no authorized person shall disclose any such social security account number or related record.

So I really can't imagine the court can defend this in any way at all.

Re:Enter legislation

[zymurgyboy]

A leak would be one thing; these muppets INTENTIONALLY POSTED this stuff. From TFA:

But the court's IT director defended the practices, saying that documents are being posted on the Web site in accordance with California laws and that finding data such as Social Security numbers is akin to "finding a needle in a haystack."

Wow.

You know, just because something can be done, doesn't mean it is necessarily to be done. This guy may want to take a look at Maryland's case search engine [state.md.us] to see an example how someone with some sense would do it. Jeebus.