UPGRADE
Online intrusions more than criminalYou should never put any personal information on the Internet that you wouldn't want to see in the newspapers. That's the government's job.
With hardly any fuss, federal, state, and local governments routinely publish on the Internet a variety of sensitive information about us. File for bankruptcy lately? It's probably on there. Did you contribute money to John Kerry's campaign? That's online too. Here's hoping you paid up your property taxes and haven't fallen behind on child support; otherwise there may be an Internet page with your name on it. As the state's courts wrangle over whether to publish the names of sex offenders online, it's just as well to remember that sex offenders are not the only ones who are forfeiting a measure of privacy. Of course, hardly anyone sheds a tear for the released rapist whose criminal record will be on public display for the rest of his days. Sex offenders rarely know when to quit, and keeping people safe from them matters far more than the offenders' right to be let alone. Yet it sometimes seems that the convicted creeps have a stronger lobby than the rest of us. The Committee for Public Counsel Services, an organization of Massachusetts public defense attorneys, has fought like a tiger against listing the state's sex offenders online, as 42 other states do. Indeed, the committee persuaded a judge last month to order a halt to the practice. There's not nearly as much complaint about the other instances in which government agencies publish data that many would rather keep under wraps. Chalk it up to a healthy ambivalence. Americans instinctively favor open government. We want the public's business done out in the open. And so a vast amount of information about the government's dealings with citizens has always been made available to the public, at courthouses, tax assessors' offices, and other such places. Anybody could read the stuff. To read all about the travails of your friends and neighbors, you just had to show up. Only now, thanks to the Internet, you can forget about the showing-up part. Just log in. It's like having the county clerk's office in your living room. Or your own set of stocks--those wooden hitching posts that 17th-century Puritans set up on public streets. People found guilty of minor crimes were locked in the stocks for a few hours of humiliation. Throughout the country, governments have reverted to the Puritan custom by running what might be called shame sites-- Web pages that list names and photos of various miscreants. Delinquent property taxpayers, for instance, or deadbeat parents. Last week Massachusetts posted the names of nearly 1,500 individuals and businesses owing at least $25,000 in taxes. And like many other states, Massachusetts has a website listing those who haven't kept up with their child support payments. Again, it's hard to sympathize with people who don't take care of their kids. But is it necessary to announce their delinquency to the world? Barry Steinhardt, who runs the Technology Law Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, has his doubts. ''There is no public interest in knowing that someone is a deadbeat dad," Steinhardt said. ''It's done for the purpose of embarrassment." Besides, he frets that information on these sites may be inaccurate or outdated. Think about all the Web pages that haven't been updated for months or years, and you can see Steinhardt has a point. Other easily-accessed databases offer lavish opportunities for identity theft. Armed with someone's name and Social Security number, a criminal can gin up all manner of false IDs. And such information is easily obtained from court records that are just a few clicks away. For instance, many of the nation's bankruptcy courts now offer online document access, at a price of 7 cents a page. Anybody can download all manner of sensitive information, including income, property holdings, and Social Security numbers. For example, Steinhardt notes that many people go broke due to medical problems. That's all in the files. ''If you publish a record that John Bankrupt owes $10,000 to [a cancer institute], you're disclosing that John has cancer," he said. Steinhardt has talked to bankruptcy judges urging that sensitive details like these be excised before court records are put online. Perhaps you've never gone bankrupt; you may even have enough money to send a few hundred bucks to your favorite presidential candidate. You're on file--federal law requires it for contributions over $200, though campaigns often provide the data for contributions of any size. And the details of your contribution are easily accessible on the Web. It's been that way for years. The Center for Responsive Politics has been posting donor lists on its website, opensecrets.org, since 1997. But the site has its limits--it provides name, occupation, and amount, but not the donor's address. ''It's a judgment call that we made partly for privacy concerns," said Larry Noble, the group's executive director. ''Also because it makes it harder for people to use the information for commercial mailing lists, which is illegal." But self-restraint is no fun. Another site, FundRace 2004, displays all the information in the file, including donor addresses. Michael Frumin, a research fellow at Eyebeam, the New York nonprofit that runs the site, said it just wants to see ''how people react to being accountable for who they support." Visit the site at www.fundrace.org, punch in your ZIP code, and you can see the political contributions of everyone in your neighborhood. All these years, you thought Fred was a Democrat . . . Frumin said he's gotten complaints from people who say the site threatens their privacy. ''One person said they were being stalked," he said. ''Another person said, I'm a mental health professional" and worried about threats from patients. But Frumin won't take down their names. ''If they don't want people to know, they shouldn't be contributing," he said. Don't be surprised if many do just that, transforming a tool of open government into an excuse for political apathy. You can't be too hard on Frumin, though. It's all public information, stuff the public has a right to know. But that right used to be purely theoretical, and rarely exercised. Not any more. Now we really can know, and in seconds. It's empowering, heady stuff, too. Until our own name pops up.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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