FSNE - Sunshine Sunday

TALLAHASSEE — If you’ve ever driven a car, leased a home, applied for a loan, or even received mail, chances are you — and lots of information about you — are in a database somewhere.

Using public records as well as private credit histories, data miners create your digital profile, which they then sell in bulk with millions of others.

Recently, some of the buyers may have been crooks.

The recent spate of security breaches at ChoicePoint and Seisnet makes Florida’s generous Sunshine laws even more vulnerable than they already are. At least some of the information that alleged identity thieves took from ChoicePoint and LexisNexis' Seisant division, each with large computer centers in Boca Raton, originally came from public records.

“We might see a backlash because it’s easier to close public records than it is to regulate the aggregators,” said Barbara Petersen, president of the Florida First Amendment Foundation, a watchdog group that monitors the state's laws designed to help the public watch over its government.

“We need to focus on the problem and access is not the problem,” Petersen continued. “Some states have attempted to do that, and it is completely contrary to 100 years of public records policy in Florida.”

But the conflation of the internet and the epidemic of electronic data falling into the wrong hands — including a Bank of America data dump that left more than one million federal workers, including U.S. senators such as Florida Democrat Bill Nelson, at the mercy of identity thieves — frighten even the least security-conscious, who now may seek to cloak themselves in a shroud of anonymity.

Trepidation about the electronic age has already temporarily closed the window on court records, limiting the ability of people to gain access to records once readily available in Florida.

Several measures in the Legislature this year would close off the public’s access to some government records — a number of them an effort to avoid further dissemination of information. State Sen. Bill Posey, R-Rockledge, for example, has filed a bill (SB 2178) that would keep confidential much of the information that can be found on someone’s application for an absentee ballot. The measure would keep secret information such as social security number, the date the absentee ballot was requested, when it was mailed, when it was received by the supervisor and, most concerning to open records advocates, ‘‘any other information the supervisor deems necessary regarding the request." Posey said, "You shouldn’t be able to get someone’s driver’s license number" from an elections supervisor.

The bill does specify some who could still have access: other election officials, political parties, candidates, and political fund-raising committees. But the general public wouldn’t have access and that could prevent, among other things, research about voters.

"A lot of that information (could be) really important in tracking down problems in the election," Petersen said. "It’s a little unconstitutional, and I don’t think it’s in the public’s best interest given the problems we’ve had with absentee ballots."

-- In 2003, the Florida Supreme Court issued a moratorium on posting court records on the internet until the committee’s recommendations are finalized. Chief judges, however, are allowed to permit posting of court documents that have been thoroughly vetted and are of considerable public interest.

-- In August, the Florida Department of Corrections abruptly stopped providing a felony offender database to monthly subscribers. That file is part of the “felon voter purge list,” which was off-limits to reporters until a judge ordered the state open the records. Once opened, newspaper reports found the records were riddled with errors and would have caused eligible voters to be thrown off the voter rolls. Corrections officials said they stopped providing the records because they were in transition to a Web-based system, but no such system has yet been created. Spokesman Sterling Ivey also said the agency stopped providing the database after learning it was being sold to third and fourth-party vendors.

In addition, state officials, including Gov. Jeb Bush’s office, have begun to demand that public records requests be submitted in writing, contrary to Florida law. And state agencies and staff have become less and less responsive to records requests and may even have stopped generating records so that they cannot be reproduced.

“This is a pattern we’ve been seeing lately of delaying or denying access to records we’ve always had access to,” Petersen said. “It’s part of a pattern I find very disturbing.”

For example, former Secretary of Elderly Affairs Terry White was fired after more than one female employee accused him of sexual harassment.

Although Bush’s general counsel conducted a nearly week-long investigation, including personal interviews with White’s staff, his office contended that no public records, even redactable ones, existed.

“Either they set out to evade the public records law by not creating one, which is bad, or two, which is even worse, they are not disclosing public records that do exist,” Jon Kaney, a media attorney who serves on the Florida Supreme Court’s Committee on Privacy and Court Records, said of the White records. “Third, they innocently in all good faith just casually determined this man’s career without ever taking a note because they didn’t’ see the need to make any. It’s bad any way you look at it.”

Jacob DiPietre, Bush’s spokesman, said, “Gov. Bush wants open, accessible, transparent government. He personally receives and responds to 11,000 to 12,000 e-mails per month. Public records are something that we take very seriously and respond to as quick as possible.”

Bush’s press office, which has a full-time staff of six, received 157 public records requests last year, DiPietre said. He said written requests “help us to speed the process along if we know exactly what we’re looking for.”

Instead of limiting access to public records, Petersen and others argue, the time has come to regulate the burgeoning data collection industry that processes billions of pieces of personal identifiers, including some such as Social Security numbers and mothers’ maiden names that accompany us virtually throughout our lives, with little or no oversight.

Nelson has filed a bill that would force companies like ChoicePoint to protect information that they collect, penalize them when security lapses occur, and give consumers access to the records that private companies keep on them so that they can correct mistakes.

“Protecting private information has nothing to do with Florida Sunshine law,” Nelson said. “We’re talking about other information, such as Social Security numbers, DNA records, medical tests. ChoicePoint has 19 billion records, records on virtually every American.”

Kaney also says that passing exemptions to public records laws in the name of protection against identity theft won’t help.

“Look at what ChoicePoint’s already got," Kaney said. "It’s beyond our power in Florida, much less in the judicial branch, to really make a secret of these numbers. The cat is out of the barn.”

The records committee, chaired by former House Speaker John Mills, was in the midst of making recommendations to the Supreme Court on how to balance the tension between access to public records and privacy rights when news of the ChoicePoint situation began to unravel.

“It’s absolutely, precisely the kind of thing we were talking about,” Mills said.

The Sunshine laws were first passed, Mills recalled, with the thought of giving the public access to information about the workings of government.

“I don’t think we really envisioned there would be these giant companies collecting all this information and selling it,” said Mills, a law professor at the University of Florida.

Figuring out how to balance privacy and access in the rapidly advancing technological era is likely to be a slow process, said Palm Beach County Chief Judge Edward Fine, who also serves on Mills’ committee.

Recognizing that all court records will eventually end up online in some fashion, the committee is expected to suggest limiting the information that goes into the court files and/or waiting until a judge has assured that no private information — such as checking account or credit card numbers or trade secretes — is entered into the court record.

“We’re in a transition between the old world and the new world when it comes to information,” Fine said.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.