Bad Problem Solving Skills: The Virginia Legislature Presents Example #3

If you were the Virginia Legislature, what would you do in this situation?

You pass a law in 2002 requiring all local courts to post their land records on the Internet by July 2008. Then, a concerned citizen alerts you to the fact that many of those documents contain people's social security numbers and are now published on the net for the world to see (and identity thieves to use).

Do you:

1. Immediately shut down the document websites until the SSNs can be redacted.
2. Force the localities to handle (and pay for) the fix as they see fit, with a strict deadline.
   
3. Make it illegal for any citizen to point out that there are SSNs posted on the web, but do nothing about the fact that there are now SSNs posted on the web.

If you said #3, amazingly you'd be right. The concerned citizen in this case is Betty Ostergren who runs The Virginia Watchdog website. The law the legislature passed was know colloquially as "The BJ Ostergren Law" but is officially an amendment to The Personal Information Privacy Act. How does this act protect your privacy? Well, in a nutshell, it protects you from criminals who might want to post your SSN on a website. Of course, the fact that they already have criminal intent clouds that logic, but hey, why be a buzz-kill with the whole "logic" thing?

What Betty was doing that got her noticed, was posting the SSN's of famous/political people on her website in order to draw attention to the fact that those very SSNs were available on a government website. So rather than fix the privacy problem, Virginia has opted to pretend like there is no problem. And anyone who says there is a problem, is a fool, a Communist (to paraphrase Bill Hicks) and now, a criminal. Betty's method may not have been the most subtle way of getting attention, but clearly it worked. However, the legislature can't seem to think their way out of a paper bag long enough to see that REMOVING the SSNs is the ONLY solution to this problem

So now, we're left with this uniquely 'Virginia' legislative solution. The state publishes public information (many with SSNs) on a public website, but the public is not allowed to use that information in any way that might be construed as 'communicating' it, lest they be convicted of breaking this new law. So the Virginia Freedom of Information Act has essentially been 'amended' to say "Here's the public information, you can't talk to anyone about it". Nice.

And as if the irony wasn't thick enough, the patron of the bill was Sen. R. Edward Houck, (D-Spotsylvania), who is also chairman of the Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council. Sen Houck offered this very anemic analogy of Ms. Ostergren's attention getting tactics:

"That would be like trying to make it illegal to shoot someone with a firearm and the way you do that is to go out an get an AK-47 and mow down a bunch of people in a parking lot."

Allow me to offer a better analogy.

Sen. Houck's bill is like trying to prevent house fires by disabling smoke alarms. Because if there's no alarm, there's no fire!

Genius! Now I know why we pay these people!

Oh, and Senator Houck? You do know the Internet is global right? So what happens if a Russian organized crime group gets the SSNs?