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.'"

Comments

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

[frosty_tsm]

Official Identity Theft Aftermath Cleanup Technician.

Better would be a demotion to "Public Toilet Cleanup Technician"... "Official Public Toilet Aftermath Cleanup Technician"?

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 to see an example how someone with some sense would do it. Jeebus.