As you know by now, the Texas Attorney General issued an Opinion (GA-0519) last week (2/21/07) that basically said it is a crime (that could subject a County Clerk to fines, jail time or both) to disclose SSNs in public records (land records and other courthouse records may be public, but people have a right for personal identification in them, such as SSNs, to remain confidential). The AG opinion cited both state (Sec. 552.147 of the Texas Government Code) and federal (Public Information Act) laws.
So, most County Clerks overreacted, by preventing abstractors, surveyors, etc. from searching public records, either entirely or at least until county personnel could review the documents first.
Now, the Texas state House of Representatives will be voting on emergency legislation soon, probably on Wed 2/28/07 that may remove the portion of state law that caused the AG to limit access to public records.
Recent efforts to solve this problem before it got this far have been incomplete, centering on redaction, which is usually done by an expensive computer program that crawls through documents and blacks out SSNs it finds. Such programs have been consistently shown to miss lots of SSNs.
And removing SSNs one by one, by county personnel, is an overwhelming task that will take years to get right.
There are voices that say:
We need to get records back in the courthouse. Before the internet, access to personal information has always been limited by requiring a personal visit to a courthouse. And most of the people who search them are professionals who keep this information protected.
For example, laws that regulate licensing of Texas Registered Professional Land Surveyors, also require that they perform their duties to a higher standard of moral and ethical responsibility that already requires the protection of such personal information. And, title abstractors are bound by their contracts with mortgage lenders to keep non-public personal information (NPPI) secret during a job, and destroy it once the job is done, under previous Federal law (the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999).
The debate is still on and there is even a call for action to ask legislators to reopen access to records. |
