King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn held a press conference today to discuss this recent discovery:
King County's Records, Elections, and Licensing Services (REALS) Division has posted the social security numbers for potentially thousands of current and former King County residents ... The problem was revealed when a constituent of District Nine contacted Dunn's office [last week] to inform them that by performing a records search on herself, she had found her social security number on the REALS website.Ouch. The problem isn't with Elections records, but with certain property records which are also administered by the REALS division, headed by the outgoing Dean Logan.
More information and correspondence between Dunn and Logan are posted at Dunn's website. REALS has apparently known about this issue for a while. Property ownership records are legitimately public information. But there's no good reason to publish social security numbers and the potential for identity theft is horrific. The state legislature should explicitly require that social security numbers be redacted from any public records prior to disclosure. But Dean Logan, his predecessors who initiated this program and their boss, Ron Sims, should also have been more proactive on this issue to protect the public.
Dunn also links to this form which enables individuals to ask the county to remove from its website documents that contain social security numbers and certain other personal information.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at June 26, 2006 03:26 PM | Email Thisperhaps this is so undocumented aliens could find a ssn to thier liking so they could have an easier time finding work and registering to vote.
Posted by: TrueSoldier on June 26, 2006 03:37 PMAre you kidding me? I have to fill out a form to keep my Social Security number and other personal info off the web? Talk about doing things bass ackwards... they had no business putting it up there in the first place. What a load of Barbara Streisand.
Kudos to Dunn for raising a stink about this.
Posted by: Mike H on June 26, 2006 03:42 PMYet another example of Government Working For You(TM).... not.
You have to fill out 1 form per offending document; good luck boys if you have any trail of property or re-financings :)
Posted by: righton on June 26, 2006 05:07 PMLogan doesn't think it's very risky because he's safe. No one would ever want to steal his identity and become known as Dean Logan, Elections Bafoon. Even ID theft criminals have higher standards than to tarnish their reputations with that of Dean Logan's.
Where are you.....The citizens of King County need one of your "18 hour Class Action Lawsuits"...
Seriously, I do hours of research, and I have known about the SS#'s, and always wondered why they didn't blank em out. But I think Dunn is right, this is a REAL problem (no pun intended)
Jeff B, your so funny, I thought the same thing about Logan, nobody would steal his identity....
Posted by: Chris on June 26, 2006 08:16 PMI was going to join in stomping them, but bethought me to look at some of those records. I called up (on the Recorder's website) the approx 1-square-mile section I live in, and asked for all the Deeds of Trust. More than 100 appeared, the earliest dated 1999. Sure enough, the very first one had a signature block for the grantors (the folks who used their property as security for a honkin' big loan) which included lines for Social Security Numbers - and those ninnies (not KCRE) had filled them in.
Is this a general practice? No. Out of the first 30 Deeds of Trust, I only found two with those pre-printed lines for SSNs, and only one of the two actually included the numbers.
Those two Deeds of Trust were both on forms generated by Washington Credit Union, of Mountlake Terrace. If that company feels that exposing the SSNs of their debtors by recording them as public records is necessary to their business, then said company may need to prepare a defense in case those SSNs are abused by malicious third parties.
In any case, it's the business of KCRE to record those documents exactly as they are executed. In my humble opinion, anyone who applies their SSN voluntarily to a publicly recorded document is begging for ID thieves to make free with the information. However, if the lender who prepares those Deed of Trust forms insists on the application of SSNs as well as notarized signatures, said lender must bear some responsibility for any future abuse.
Posted by: Hank Bradley on June 26, 2006 09:13 PMIt's never too late, and the Internet shouldn't be blamed. Public records being public, anyone since SSNs were created in the 1930s, who discloses their SSN on a recorded document, has thereby made their SSN a public record. Anyone may walk into the King County Administration Building, cozy up to the microfilm readers, and extract as many SSNs as they can find. The Internet only saves the researchers a trip to 5th Avenue - it doesn't disclose any more than the original document, or its microfilm copy.
In the Congressional debates over issuing numbers to citizens (anti-collectivists fiercely opposed such a thing), it was promised that 'Social Security numbers will never be used as ID numbers'. But in the enormous expansion of the governmental/bureaucratic morass since the 1930s, an avalanche of agencies from the IRS on down chose to violate that promise.
Now we see certain lenders, such as Washington Credit Union, mindlessly creating spaces on their documents for SSNs, and others (who apparently don't understand that by the Statute of Frauds, legal documents pertaining to real estate must be made public by recording) failing to refuse to furnish them.
The whole point of notarized signatures is that they clearly establish the IDs of the signatories. SSNs on such documents are redundant.
Posted by: Hank Bradley on June 27, 2006 07:21 AMAttn. ID thieves: Look here
Councilman publicly points out exploitable weakness in Web site
By NEIL MODIE
P-I REPORTER
If identity thieves needed assistance plundering King County's records for sensitive personal data about its citizens, County Councilman Reagan Dunn may have unwittingly helped them out Monday.
P-I reporter Neil Modie can be reached at 206-448-8321 or neilmodie@seattlepi.com.
The Seattle Post Intelligencer (206) 448-4000 has chosen to present this as being all King County Councilman Reagan Dunn's fault because he did not
work with Dean Logan
The problem is that Dean Logan has short timers and nothing of significance is going to get fixed in the next month before he moves to Los Angeles
Having to fill out a form to have personal identifiers removed is absurd
A normal elections department would remove all personal identifiers before posting the data as public records on the web and on microfiche
I'll let Hank Bradley, Richard Pope, and Steve Berman argue with Washington Credit Union as to whether SSNs should be listed as public information
Another part of the Seattle Silliness is that KCRE expects the executor or an estate to notify the county when the person dies. Banks have individuals who read the obits, the legal notices, and also obtain a listing from the Social Security administration of decedents. The banks know that stuff falls through the cracks when someone dies and they act to help the former customer
KCRE needs to be proactive not reactive and this major error is another example that Dean Logan (no matter how nice a guy he is) was the wrong choice for the job
Posted by: Green Lake Mark on June 27, 2006 08:51 AMMaybe we need to wait until there is an R gov before it is an issue big enough for the ACLU to confront.
Posted by: Fred on June 27, 2006 09:37 AMAlso, now that our signatures are easily available for all to see and print, it make VBM even more secure!
They take pride that the security is based on signature, which anyone can access and copy. Do they have a combined IQ of over 100?
Posted by: Fred on June 27, 2006 09:48 AMBalderdash. A normal elections department doesn't file public records, it administers elections and counts votes. King County's version 'counts' votes.
Read the laws which set up the requirements for the Recorders Office. They protect the public by ensuring that the entire document being recorded is plain for all to see, permanently. If any part is 'redacted', that could lead to endless special pleas to treat other parts the same way. Then what's the point of public records at all?
The Recorders Office has done exactly what it should have. The parties who should bear the blame for any hijacking of SSNs are those that require them to be placed on any document which will be publicly recorded. And a certain amount of that blame goes to anyone so naive or uninformed or stupid as to furnish their own SSN for such a document.
It would be in the public interest for King County to enact legislation which at least requires those whose SSNs are on such documents sign a waiver stating that they understand the consequences of making them a public record.
Do you really find this practical?
It amazes me how government making personnal information readily available for all to see is not an invasion of privacy, but seeing what phone number calls what phone number is 'beyond comprehension' for liberals. Again, the complaint seems to be partisan.
Posted by: Fred on June 27, 2006 10:24 AMI submitted the form Wednesday night, via email, to have 4 public documents removed from the county's REALS website. One had my wife's and my Social Security number. All 4 had information of both of us I wanted off-line. Today the county apparently removed only the one with the Social Security numbers. They also did it without any acknowledgement or notification. And I might add, with no information on the form except my name, address and records numbers. Looks to me like another half-ass county process that has opened another door for anyone to get into the Records Department and get, then remove documents so the record owners never know that they had their information exposed and stolen.
Question...
While I can understand the legal requirement to make public records available, is there a law that requires them to be made available on-line?
If not, I find it infuriating that a citizen cannot demand that his records be kept off-line. If they must be made available, then make anyone who needs them go to the county and look them up. But to make it so easy to obtain information like signatures, addresses, and anything else on these forms in a matter of minutes is absurd.
...unless of course the system has been designed to assist identity theft and voter fraud.
Posted by: MJC on June 29, 2006 11:22 PM