Identity Theft Watchdog Scores one for the Consumer

If the government is short-sighted enough to post citizens' personal identifying information on the Internet, then citizens are well within their Constitutional rights to protest that practice by re-posting the information themselves. That's the upshot of a ruling last week in Virginia's eastern district federal court by judge Robert E. Payne in a case that pitted a Virginia-based government watchdog against her own state's lawmakers.

Betty Ostergren is famous in privacy and identity theft circles as the cantankerous woman behind TheVirginiaWatchdog.com. She became outraged a few years ago when she learned that many government-run online databases in Virginia and around the country post sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers, home addresses and birth dates, in plain view for any identity thief to steal.

By searching these databases for the personal information of government leaders and posting it on her site, Ostergren hopes to call attention to the problem, provoke voter outrage and force elected officials to remove private data from government sites.

Instead of fixing the problem, Virginia lawmakers decided to shoot the messenger. In 2005 the legislature passed a law making it illegal for citizens to "(i)ntentionally communicate an individual's social security number to the general public," ignoring the fact that the state's own bureaucracy does so every day. Ostergren sued Virginia's attorney general, Robert F. McDonnell, who is responsible for enforcing the law, arguing that the measure violates her Second Amendment right to free speech. Judge Payne strongly agreed.

"It is difficult to imagine a more archetypal instance of the press informing the public of government operations through government records than Ostergren's posting of public records to demonstrate the lack of care being taken by the government to protect the private information of individuals," the judge wrote in his decision.

Ostergren won help with her lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented her in the lawsuit. "It appears this law was passed not for the purpose of protecting Social Security Numbers but to silence a critic of the state's failure to protect such numbers from identity thieves," said Kent Willis, executive director of ACLU of Virginia. "That's censorship, and the court was quick to recognize that."

Comments

[Gerri]

Way to go Betty! She pointed out to me how my SSN had been posted online when I interviewed her several years ago. I got it removed - Thank God!

Betty is doing great work and she deserves this win.

[kadi]

how do i get my info removed?