Private information from public records has been running loose for years. Can it be corralled? Should it be stopped? / By Maria Sprow

Ever since Google first became a verb back in the late 1990s, finding information about other people off the Internet has been a lazy Peeping Tom’s dream. ‘Googling’ a person’s name can provide a window into their world – what comes back is a picture of their opinions, accomplishments, family ties, friends, careers.

Google “Maria Sprow,” for instance, and what comes back with 1,180 relevant links to different web pages – a long chronicle of news articles, outdated personal projects, award announcements, some childhood memories.

But to some, Googling results are just the sugar and cream, a desert. They are for amateurs. Janice Forster knows the real information on a person – those numbers that give individuals their identity – isn’t found via Google or Yahoo.

Forster, a civilian activist of sorts and the creator of a Website called FindMyId.com, spends much of her free time searching for information – private information.

“The general public has no idea how much information is made public about them and their assets,” Forster said, adding that social security numbers, home addresses, driver’s license numbers, credit information, banking information, criminal backgrounds, property records and more can all be found online, via public records searches.

Once upon a time, public records were contained in courthouses around the country, “open” to the “public,” but only to the public nearby, or those who could afford to make the trip to the courthouse. Then several notable trends began happening: county clerks began to digitize their records, creating a more efficient government; technology allowed for the creation of large databases of information, which became a commodity, bought and sold, collected and shared; and the Internet revolutionized the way the world communicates, does business and shares information.

To be sure, public records, in many areas, have left the building. The chickens have flown the coop, the horses are out of the corral and much of the information that was once confined inside four walls is now open to the whole wide world.

This has stirred some debate, mostly between county clerks, whose job is to protect the integrity of public records while making them accessible to the public, and those who say that confidential information, even if voluntarily recorded into the public record, should remain confidential.

Even prior to a controversial Attorney General’s opinion that stated county clerks must redact social security numbers from public records, several legislators had filed bills that sought to mandate redaction of social security numbers, in effect making clerks responsible for policing the information within the public record.

Clerks and those familiar with public records say that would harm the integrity and purpose of public records and be contrary to the clerks’ stated role in government.

“There is a slippery slope when we say, ‘hey the public record is very important, we need to have all of this information available to the public – except these things,’” Denton County Clerk Cynthia Mitchell said. “I think that redacting impedes the entire purpose of why we have information available for public notice.”

Even if the idea of deleting information from the public record wasn’t inherently troublesome, having to comply with such a request would be costly for counties, who would either have to hire additional staff to comb through incoming and outgoing records or purchase costly software to help with the redactions.

Are taxpayers willing to pay to keep their private information confidential?

Several signs indicate taxpayers may not care.

Fort Bend County Clerk Dianne Wilson said she has had one request from a resident to redact their social security number from a public record since HB 2061 went into effect. She also said that often, when a filer is told they can redact social security numbers from a document prior to filing, the person will only shrug and not redact the information.

“I honestly don’t think that the county clerk’s records are being used for identity theft,” Wilson said, adding that it is easier to steal someone’s credit card information over the phone – when requesting a hotel room or making some sort of purchase – or by going through trash cans and mailboxes. Of the 1,200 property records filed in her office every day, she estimated that about 10 of them will have social security numbers in them.

“I had a gentleman come in here just a few minutes ago with a divorce decree and it had his social security number in it. We asked him to redact (mark through it himself), and he said no. I guess he just didn’t think it was any big deal,” she said. “For most people now, even my 80-year-old in-laws, say ‘It’s no big deal.’ I’ve seen people entering costs give away their social security number.”

Still, Wilson has purchased software and is now redacting the first five digits of social security numbers from the digital images taken of the incoming documents.

“We’re doing it anyway, regardless,” she said.

Others say members of the public just don’t understand the issue enough to know better.

Forster, whose “Find My ID” Website warns that “anyone with Internet access – in any country – now has access to your signature, social security number, home address, bank information, and other sensitive information – located in your county’s records!” said people are normally shocked by the information she can find about them via online public records searches – and not through the paid sites found by Google, but through county-owned Websites.

“The tax office or even the Register of Deeds will have your name in their index, along with a physical address, a photo of the home, and a hot link to Mapquest for directions to that home. Checking the land index will provide full document images of every transaction in their office. This list may include wills, separation agreements, social security numbers, lists of assets, retirement information such as specific investments, banking information and identity, power of attorney listing relatives or relationship of parties, a copy of your signature that can be cut and pasted on any document of choice, and a rough estimate of your worth based on loan amounts,” Forster said. “Thieves would be foolish to use pay sites when so much detailed information is provided by county offices.”

But the warning on Forster’s Website is misleading. Few counties have so far made their public records available via the Internet, and where counties have put records online, social security numbers are still hard to come by.

Little information came up for “Maria Sprow” via Forster’s search of public records . Home addresses that turned up were eight years old, and no social security number was found. But, Forster said, it would have been different for a home owner, and the search for one person can lead to information about family members. Forster now knows where “David Sprow” lives, that he discharged one mortgage on 56 acres of land and then had a second mortgage taken out in June of 2004, and that he uses Bank One as his lender – and that’s all information supplied by the public records index. No confidential numbers were listed, but the Monroe County, Mich. Website where the records were found charges fees to those who actually want to view documents. Forster did not pay the fee during her search. Clerks say those who worry about identity theft crimes being committed via public records are being alarmist.

“I’m not sure exactly how much identity theft begins in the courthouse,” Mitchell said. “Typically the only records that contain social security numbers that are readily available to the public are liens, certainly not an identity you would want to steal.”

She added that the public must somehow be retrained to protect their identifying information.

“It’s very unfortunate that the public doesn’t know that when they go to buy a house, they are not required to have their social security number listed in that document. Ideally, we as the public should be empowered with the knowledge of what information they should never give out,” Mitchell said, but added that several steps are already being taken, and still, the public remains unaware. For instance, clerks are required to post notices in their offices stating that social security and driver’s license numbers aren’t required on property records, and clerks often verbally tell citizens that same message. Still, social security numbers appear in documents.

Mitchell said she has not received a single request from a resident to remove his or her social security number from public records. She is not redacting the information herself unless there is a request, she added.

“I don’t think (HB 2061) gives you blanket authority to modify the public record, either going forward or going backward,” Mitchell said. “Some clerks have gone through redaction practices from the beginning of time, or of filing, and their justification for that is, who is going to complain? And some have removed no social security number from a public record.”

Swisher County and District Clerk Brenda Hudson, president of the County and District Clerks Association of Texas, also said she is not redacting social security numbers at this time, other than having the request forms available for residents. So far, no one in Swisher County has requested the information be redacted, though the county’s documents are not available on the Internet. “I’m very concerned about the confidentiality of private information,” Hudson said. “I’ve had a very close friend that was a victim of identity theft, but that didn’t have anything to do with their social security number being stolen. She had made a phone call to make hotel reservations for an event that she and her husband were going to, and the person who took her hotel reservation asked for her credit card number and zapped her account.

“It’s a really scary thought that somebody could take on your identity because of a social security number, and I don’t take that lightly,” she added, “but we’ve got to be reasonable about what we are required to do. What people fail to understand is just the mass amount of the workload clerks have. We don’t have time to read document by document. I’m not saying we wouldn’t do it, but you’ve got to have the resources and the manpower to do it.” Wilson said she believes the conflict between the principles of open government and the need to protect confidential information raises some questions that the Legislature still needs to address. “There are two main issues that need to be looked at. That is, what is a public record, and who is ‘public.’ Once you identify what is public and who is public, then you need to identify who is not public,” she said. “We don’t have that direction, and yet, there are all these laws out there that require us to provide this information to anybody and everybody. I think clerks, as custodians of records, are looking for some type of guidance. We have a lot of countries buying land right here in the county. We have a Chinese investor, he lives in China, but he owns land here. Does he have a right to look at these records? He is not a citizen, but he’s a foreign investor, and it’s allowed by our statutes.”

David Bloys, a private investigator and identity theft expert who is against putting public records online, agreed that there are two different definitions of ‘public’ at play – the definition that fit in 1936 when social security numbers first came about, and the definition that fits with today’s Internet-centric world.

“There is a huge difference between allowing your neighbor to catch a glimpse of your social security number and compromising millions of records containing all types of sensitive information on everyone in the community to everyone in the world with an Internet connection,” Bloys said.

About 30 Texas counties have posted their public records on the Internet. Doing so, clerks said, improves efficiency and convenience of government and follows the inherent intent of public records. Taking public records offline, they argue, wouldn’t have a bearing on the amount of information available because clerks would still be required by law to sell digitized public records to any interested buyer – including information resellers and others responsible for paid public records search engines, such as www.countypublicrecords. com, www.publicrecords.com, www.gov-records.com, www.netsleuth. com and www.dmv.org, among hundreds of others. Attempts to stop the selling of public records would bring instant background and credit checks to a halt, which would slow down loans, real estate and property transactions, and a slew of other critical industries. Perhaps one of the biggest questions still up in the air is that of responsibility – who is responsible for the information within public records, the filer, or the keeper?

Some believe that since the county does not actually own the records, they do not have the right to modify the records. Others argue that if someone writes a novel, the librarian should not be responsible for its contents.

“The public records do not belong to the county clerk, they do not belong to the county, they belong to the public. The whole purpose of public records is that no one can hide behind a closed record. You want to know what is happening in your neighborhood, your county, your state,” Wilson said.

Many clerks strongly believe policing the information inside public records is just flat outside the duties of the county clerk.

“Making us responsible for what the public record contains is just bad judgment, bad business,” Mitchell said. “Clerks cannot possibly be authorized to police documents that are being put into the public record. Clerks aren’t lawyers, so we couldn’t possibly know when identifiers are necessary, that’s a legal determination. As far as being able to recognize a personal identifier, I’m not saying I couldn’t recognize one, but we get 1,000 documents a day in my office, it would be inefficient to have to search each of those documents. It would cause huge delays. It would cause the county to have to increase staff size. Historically, clerks have not been responsible (for policing documents), and I don’t think it’s an appropriate responsibility for a clerk.”

Forster said everyone should take responsibility for the confidential information that is inside public records, and stop looking at it as a privacy issue – it’s a security issue.

“When you look at people like stalking victims… we all have a responsibility to make sure each other is safe,” she said. “I think that with the public, ignorance has been bliss. They just assume that everyone else should protect them. … But I think the gatekeepers of those records should make sure those notes don’t get into the wrong hands. The clerks have a great opportunity to be the gatekeepers, and I think the opportunities have been missed.”

Legislature’s rebuke to AG’s opinion has clerks relieved, but worried about future actions

Debate about how to handle the confidential information held within public records reached a new high in February, when Attorney General Greg Abbott released GA-0519, an opinion regarding social security number redaction.

The opinion, released Feb. 21, determined that social security numbers are confidential, and noted that disclosure of confidential information is a crime. This ruling effectively required county clerks to redact social security numbers before giving access to a public record. In addition, the opinion stated that clerks could not redact information from the original documents held in the courthouse. Instead, they would have to make a copy of the original and redact the social security number from the copy prior to making it available to the public.

Fort Bend County Clerk Dianne Wilson, whose office had requested the opinion, said she was shocked by the outcome of the request, which stemmed from a 2005 law, Government Code Section 553.147, that stated, verbatim, “a governmental body may redact the social security number of a living person from any information the governmental body discloses under Section .021 without the necessity of requesting a decision from the attorney general.” Many clerks around the state had chosen not to redact the information from public records, for various reasons.

“During the legislative session, it was never implied that that had to do with public records. The discussion had been mainly about personnel records and things like that. After the bill passed, I received some phone calls from citizens asking to have their social security number redacted, and one of the requests was regarding a federal tax lien,” Wilson said. “Plus we had some folks here in Fort Bend who felt that more information needed to be redacted. … I didn’t feel like I had the legal authority to do that.”

The redaction requests were complicated because copies of public records must be certified – meaning that they have not been altered from the original filed forms in any way.

“I just wanted to find out what we could and could not do in relation to the redaction and also to the certification,” Wilson said. “I was rather surprised… the AG’s opinion took a ‘may’ law and turned it into a ‘shall’ law.”

Abbott’s opinion came partially from federal law, which states that a person’s social security number is confidential if it is maintained pursuant to a law enacted after October 1, 1990. A person that discloses the social security number of a living person in violation of this provision is guilty of a felony under federal law. In Texas, there are about a dozen documents that require social security numbers. County clerks are generally responsible for holding onto one of those documents – child support liens, most commonly requested by staff in the Attorney General’s office. The other documents are commonly filed in the district clerk’s office.

Many of the social security numbers found within both offices are put there voluntarily by the filer. To redact that information, clerks and their staff would have to personally read each page handed to them – in some cases, that’s thousands of pages a day. So it’s no wonder why Williamson County Clerk Nancy Rister didn’t get much sleep on the night the opinion was released. To the average citizen, social security redaction sounds like a small thing. But to Rister and clerks around the state, the opinion was a logistical nightmare.

“There are lots of records that contain social security numbers,” Rister said. “And that was a pretty heavy cloud hanging over our head, that there was the threat of criminal prosecution. My attorneys in the county, the prosecutors, said if there was a complaint, they would have to file charges. It left me faint, to say the least.” GA-0519 caused clerks around the state to close down access to public records.

“I was up close to midnight emailing people and trying to see if anybody else was reading what I read,” Rister said. “It was as if everything was in slow-motion that night. Then, the next day, Thursday, I just immediately pulled our records off the Internet. I asked the county attorney’s office about it, and the District Attorney, and they just had gotten wind of it, and we started talking about it back and forth, and by Friday, I had shut all my records down.”

Tarrant County Clerk Suzanne Henderson said she was told not to shut down her office after reading the Attorney General’s opinion because the fiscal impact to the county would be too great. “I was devastated,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that an opinion would come down like that that would shut my office down. But I talked to my county attorney and he recommended that I just leave everything status quo until he had time to research the laws. We left everything open.”

Complying with the Attorney General’s opinion “would have shut commerce down in Tarrant County. We have a huge oil and gas boom going on in Tarrant County with the Barnett Shale drilling, and there are hundreds of people coming into my office every day doing oil and gas research… to determine ownership,” she added. “I was nervous either way. I was nervous about leaving public records open, and I was nervous about the ramifications if I shut it down.” The Attorney General, having been seemingly surprised by the