FortBendNow.com

In the midst of what’s become a political debate over the care and feeding of public records, Fort Bend County Clerk Dianne Wilson has decided to remove Internet web access to probate records.

Wilson said Saturday she made the decision last week after reviewing all types of records in her office and finding that the ones most often containing personal identifiers such as Social Security numbers were probate records, involving identifiers of people who have died.

While her office is converting data in preparation for a new case management system, she said she also decided to remove web access to the probate records “in hopes that the Attorney General will rule favorable that county and district clerks in Texas can delete Social Security numbers from documents.”

Access to public records and the ever-present Evils of the Internet merged to become a political issue thanks to the recent efforts of the Fort Bend Herald and Texas Coaster. The paper ran a four-part series last month essentially allowing a former private detective to rag on Wilson over the course of a week pretty much without rebuttal, while revealing the shocking news that people can accomplish tasks over the Internet that are not nice.

Full Disclosure: I’m a journalist. I’ve accessed public documents hundreds of times in the course of preparing news articles, and to save time, I access public records online whenever possible.

I have obtained public records in bulk – bought entire databases, some of which contained individual identifiers. These were used to discover information such as: how many public school teachers had, unbeknownst to the districts in which they worked, been convicted of serious felonies.

I am biased when it comes to issues involving public access to public records. My work has led me to believe: The more access, the greater overall public good. I understand that many people don’t agree with that view, but I still think they’re wrong.

As a biased fan in favor of public access to public documents, it puzzles me to see a newspaper obviously pushing an agenda aimed at limiting public access. As an admitted cynic, I tend to envision dotted lines of political connection when I read a four-part series on the dangers of web-accessible public documents about a week before D. Anne Crisswell, Republican candidate for county clerk, begins running on a platform consisting mostly of removing Internet access to public records.

Here are some points being muddied in this stalking-horse debate over public records:

→ Information filed in public documents gets there when individuals, or lawyers for individuals, put it in there. In almost every case, public documents exist in the form they do because of legal requirements created through legislation.

Custodians of public records don’t have the legal authority to change the required forms that become public documents. They also don’t generally have the authority to change or redact information that individuals (or their lawyers) insert into public documents.

In other words, if you think there’s too much personal information in public documents, find out who your state representatives are and work through them to make changes in the law.

If you feel the need to blame someone, I find it’s often fun to blame the federal government. When the Social Security system was created, regulations were put forward making it an offense for any business or agency to use a person’s Social Security number as an individual identifier.

Decades later, you can’t get a bank account, health insurance or a job without giving away your Social Security number. What happened to those federal regulations?

→ The Internet is not inherently evil, anymore than your cell phone (or your garden rake) is inherently evil. It’s a communications tool. Tools can be used for good or evil, depending upon the intent of the user.

Removing Internet access to public documents, to me, makes approximately as much sense as removing the courthouse phone system.

Removing public documents from the web means that only the likes of lawyers, private detectives, news reporters and people living within, say, 20 miles of the county courthouse will have real access to public records. By the time a waitress in Katy or a retail worker in Needville gets off work at 5 or 6 p.m., the Fort Bend County Courthouse is closed up tight.

That means for many people, the only way to access “public” records would be to either lose a day’s pay or hire a lawyer or private detective to retrieve them. That might be great for business if you’re a PI, but it isn’t fair to most of the public.

→ Most identity theft does not happen over the Internet. Identity theft is a lot more likely to come in the form of someone getting and abusing your credit card number than it is from someone searching for your Social Security number online.

People use credit cards a lot more today than they did 10 or 20 years ago. People use their credit cards at “real” retail establishments and restaurants a lot more often than they do online.

How many of you went out to dinner over the past month and gave your credit card to a young man or woman in their teens or 20s whom you’d never met before, and who went around the corner with your Visa and didn’t return for 15 minutes or so?

Fort Bend County has people under indictment right now who are accused of working at major restaurant chains where they allegedly used portable “swipers” in their pockets to instantly obtain unsuspecting customers’ credit card numbers, which they then either used themselves or traded to other savory individuals in other parts of the country.

This type of criminal operation, unfortunately, is not uncommon.

→ There are ways to allow the public to maintain true access to public documents via the Internet, and still remove private identifiers from public view. One of them is an idea Wilson said a Texas Supreme Court “Public Access to Court Records” Committee, on which she serves, came up with.

The idea is that any identification such as Social Security numbers, bank account numbers or driver’s license numbers be included on a form separate from the rest of the public document, which is sealed upon filing. The sealed information may be unsealed when a judge or other appropriate official deems it necessary. Otherwise, it’s unavailable, on-line or off.

Wilson said her committee made that recommendation in 2004. The Texas Supreme Court hasn’t acted on it.

It would be nice if they did.

Weekend Politics
by Bob Dunn