Much has been written about how people are absurdly careless with their personal information online, offering everything from their home being readily available for theft to their least savory moments with unknown suitors in dimly lit pubs.   Little by little, people are beginning to realize that a moments foolishness can be their perpetual online legacy, and they restrain that urge to update their facebook with the running description of their bathing rituals.

That’s all well and good, but does that mean you’re now safe from online shenanigans?

Not as long as the government has its way.  While you calmly vet your online information to protect yourself, various tentacles of the government are busy mindlessly posting your personal information on the internet.  How personal?  Like your social security number, in tandem with other identifying data that is commonly used to access your financial and personal records.  Via The Virginia Watchdog :

Your SSN is just a click away on the world wide web and it was most likely put there by some stupid elected official. And your health information is next.   Go to more news articles in our archives  and see examples of records put online by courts and other state agencies.  Yours could be online somewhere right now.    Many state agencies across the country like New York, Colorado, and Pennsylvania have SSNs online today available to anyone, anywhere in the world.   

This is no tin foil society, but quite real.  Government, in the name of transparency, allows access to data of all sorts indiscriminately, from properties to court records.  Within this is a gold mine of personal information, necessary for the purposes of internally maintaining identification information but definitely not the sort of stuff you would hand over to the folks running the omnipresent Nigerian lottery.  And yet it’s all there, neatly available.

BJ Ostergren wasn’t happy about this, and decided to address it by doing a little tit for tat, publishing the SSNs of public officials online to see how much they liked having their personal information exposed.  Shockingly, they didn’t. So they tried to shut her down.  No dice, said the Fourth Circuit in Ostregren v. Cuccinelli.

“The unredacted SSNs on Virginia land records that Ostergren has posted online are integral to her message,” Judge Allyson Duncan wrote in the unanimous opinion. “Indeed, they are her message. Displaying them proves Virginia’s failure to safeguard private information and powerfully demonstrates why Virginia citizens should be concerned.”

The court also agreed that the state cannot punish Ostergren for posting on her website the same public records that the government makes available online.

“Ms. Ostergren’s most powerful advocacy weapon has been to demonstrate to the public how bad a job the government is doing to protect our online privacy rights,” said Kent Willis, executive director of the ACLU of Virginia, which represented Ostergren. “The government responded, but by trying to silence Ms. Ostergren.”

Putting aside our sheep-like willingness to provide personal information on demand to petty much anyone who asks, whether governmental or the nice young lady at the cash register of your local big box store, what this reflects is the difficulty of those entrusted with personal information of exercising reasonable judgment, and putting in the amount of effort, necessary to protect us.  Thousand, if not millions, of records are dumped online so that politicians can claim transparency, but it takes a lot of manpower, not to mention a little bit of thought, to deal with it in a way that doesn’t expose our information to anyone who cares to look.

No matter how well we conduct ourselves, or teach our children, to be circumspect in our online dealings, it’s not going to help without the cooperation of government clerks who mindlessly offer us up on a silver platter.  Some might view BJ Ostergren’s actions in exposing government officials in the same way they expose others, but asking nicely isn’t working out too well and this needs to be stopped. 

Is it harsh to expose the personal information of government officials to all the scammers, cheaters, liars and thieves online.  You bet.  When the lesson can’t be taught nicely, unfortunately, harsh measures are needed.  This has got to be stopped.