Privacy advocate gets partial win in SSN postings case

By Larry O’Dell, The Associated Press
Published: August 24, 2008

RICHMOND — A privacy advocate who challenged a new Virginia law barring people from posting Social Security numbers on the Internet won a partial victory in federal court Friday.
U.S. District Judge Robert Payne ruled that the law is unconstitutional as applied to B.J. Ostergren’s current and past Web site postings. However, the judge said he would require further briefing on whether to issue a more far-reaching injunction concerning future postings of Social Security numbers by Ostergren or others.
On her site, Ostergren has posted public documents — primarily land records — containing the Social Security numbers of prominent people and court officials. Her purpose is to demonstrate that government has failed to protect individuals’ privacy. She claimed in her lawsuit that government can’t publish the information and then punish citizens for distributing it.
Payne agreed, saying Ostergren’s activities were protected by the First Amendment.
“It is difficult to imagine a more archetypal instance of the press informing the public of government operations through government records than Ostergren’s posting of public records to demonstrate the lack of care being taken by the government to protect the private information of individuals,” Payne wrote.
The attorney general’s office claimed that the state had a legitimate interest in restricting the dissemination of Social Security numbers to prevent identity theft and fraud. However, Payne noted that another new state law requires court clerks to post all land records online. Some of those records contain Social Security numbers, and the General Assembly hasn’t funded an initiative to block out those numbers.
“In this case, the state’s own conduct in making those SSNs publicly available through unredacted release on the Internet significantly undercuts the assertion made by the state in this litigation that the state actually regards protection of SSNs as an interest of the highest order,” the judge wrote.
Nevertheless, Payne said “the significant public interest issues presented by the spreading of SSNs on the Internet” warranted further briefing on whether he should do more than protect Ostergren’s existing Web site.
Kent Willis, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Virginia, said the judge recognized the new law as censorship. The ACLU represents Ostergren in the lawsuit.
“In the end, it appears this law was passed not for the purpose of protecting Social Security numbers but to silence a critic of the state’s failure to protect such numbers from identity thieves,” Willis said.
The attorney general’s office had no immediate comment.