A few years ago, when the dot com bubble was still bubbling, legislators in the State of Florida got the 'technology bug' and mandated that all Florida counties put all public records on 'The Web.' We have no idea if the companies that make the hardware and software used to implement the mandate handed out campaign contributions to encourage this technology leap. But a lot of money has been spent on such technology in the years since, from dozens of high speed scanners to terabytes of storage and thousands of lines of Web code.

The result? A large group of people, and even the country as a whole, is probably a lot less safe than it used to be. To understand why, take a look at a Web page we have put up to demonstrate:

http://www.privacyforbusiness.com/example1.htm

The link on the right of that page shows you a prime example of what can happen when people don't fully grasp the relationship between privacy, technology, and human nature. Anyone on the planet with an Internet connection can now find intensely personal details about individuals who have lived in, or passed through, Florida.

One such class of persons is elderly folk whose relatives have filed power of attorney (these records sometimes include banking data along with SSN and signature). Another worrying class of victims is U.S. military personnel. You can find out what their specialties are, their Social Security Numbers, addresses, relatives, signature, and so forth.

The example we give is one of these, from Duval County, the most populous county in Florida. What you will see is the record as it appears on the Web, except that we added red ink to blot out key portions of the name of this particular person. If you go to the Duval County web site, from any country in the world, you can find thousands of records just like this, with the name and SSN in place, NOT crossed out. Many of these people are not Florida residents, they just happen to have left the service while in Florida.

The legislators who mandated this state of affairs were not alone in their failure to realize that "The Web" is the same "World Wide Web" you can access from anywhere, from Boca Raton to Bulgaria, Tampa Bay to Turkistan. A number of federal government agencies took the same leap off the cliff of commonsense in their eagerness to save money by automating public access to information. The basic mistake was to think of the Internet as the American public. Perhaps their Internet bubble was a Venn diagram in which the set of all U.S. citizens neatly coincided with the set of all Internet users. In the very early days of the Internet that might have been forgivable, but these days, when the evening news routinely pulls its footage from Islamic fundamentalist web sites, you would think we'd all be a bit wiser. Apparently not.

Consider how you get to these records, many of which are the perfect starting point for the crime of identity theft. You would think that you would need to know a specific person's name to find public records pertaining to them. But no, in Duval County you can simply ask to see all records of a particular type within a valid date range. In other counties you can't browse all records at once, but a very lame search mechanism lets you enter a single letter for a last name, like "A," and thus browse all persons whose name begins with "A," from Aarnem to Aziz. At some sites, including Duval, you don't even need a document viewer like Acrobat because the county provides one for you.

Needless to say, we think this type of access to people's private information is wrong. Our government does not have the right to publish to the world our Social Security Numbers, signatures, and other personal details (and this doesn't even get into the whole issue of Florida juvenile records wrongly placed in the public domain). Things need to be changed. If anyone would like to contact us about efforts to effect changes we will try to do what we can to help.

What sort of changes are needed? Well, expunging all Social Security Numbers would be a start, but even easier would be the requirement that you need to know the name of the person whose public records you are seeking. And personally, we see no reason for military discharge papers to be made available at the county level. Why not make that a responsibility of the branch of the armed services in which the person served?

In the broader scheme of things Americans need to do some serious thinking about what 'public record' means. Stephen is sitting in a bar in Amsterdam right now, looking at military service records of people from Alabama to Wyoming. He's also viewing aerial photographs of properties in our Florida neighborhood, then pulling up the names and addresses of the owners, seeing what they paid for their homes and if their taxes are current. Does he have a right to do that? From there? And what about the fundamentalist who might be sitting next to him in that bar?