Accessing Public Records in the Digital Age?

A concerned Anonymous Coward asks: "News.com has a story about what happened last week with RootsWeb. The state of California legally sold them the birth records of all Californians born since 1905, and they put the records online. Our Senator, Jackie Speier, immediately took action to stop the selling of these records in electronic form. Should public records (drivers licenses, criminal records, birth/death records etc...) be this accessible? Is it not hypocritical to make these records public but not easily accessible, or does the level of accessibility matter? Does it matter that they want to make this information easily accessible to big businesses (credit card companies, snail mail spammers) but not to the private citizen? Or should all these records just simply not be public?" There's a difference between "publicly available" and "publicly accessible", and there is something to be said about using this information for evil. How can we balance the two? The records should be available, yes, but only accessible to people who might need it (hint: not spammers and resellers). This issue is currently under debate in New York, as well.