April 9, 2000

NOT SO PRIVATE AS YOU IMAGINE

The Denver Rocky Mountain News held training sessions this past week for staff members to learn to use a new research tool, a Web site called http://www.FlatRateInfo.com. With a related site called http://www.QuickInfo.net, it links dozens of county, state and national databases, all searchable with a single mouse click. All I can say is, it gives a whole new meaning to the term "public record."

This investigative power is harnessed to legitimate public purposes, at least in theory. The companies that provide it subscribe to a very detailed industry code about who can have access to what information and why; it's on the Web site http://www.irsg.org (Individual Reference Services Group). The organization audits companies regularly to ensure their compliance; our instructor, Wil Herren, said his company was currently in the midst of its audit.

You and I can't sign up as individual subscribers just out of curiosity.

Clients are law enforcement, law firms, licensed private investigators, media and others with a need to know - a hospital, for instance, trying to locate former participants in medical research. Information can't be used for marketing and it can't be downloaded in bulk. Access to the system is limited to specific locations, and every search is logged and monitored for inappropriate use.

All that's very well, and those are reasonable safeguards, and yet it's not hard to envision someone kicking over the traces. A single disgruntled employee on his way out could do a lot of damage on his last afternoon at work.

FlatRate's main "people locator" has some 630 million records, including a current and two previous addresses for each person. It's based on the records kept by credit bureaus - the header information, not the financial data - and allows a person's Social Security number to be linked to a current address and to records in other databases. The Social Security number - "the Social," Herren called it - is not public, but other information is either official public record, such as motor vehicle or voter registration, or publicly available.

My name's not common, and when I type it in to the people locator I get only three matches. (For the record, I am not the Linda Seebach in New Mexico who writes books on multidimensional hyperspace awareness. But I knew about her from Web searches.) If the person I'm looking for is listed, I can send "Fetch the Wonder Dog" to retrieve any other entries in the database pertaining to that person.

Fetch may come back with some other things as well; in my case, two marriages by people with my name who aren't me.

Search from a person to an address to the names (and phone numbers) of neighbors who live up and down the block; from a person to the property he owns to other owners of the same property. The power lies not in the records, which have long been available to anyone who showed up at the right office, but in the fact that they are all linked.

Legislators are beginning to be uneasy about all this. The Colorado House has passed a bill, HB 1380, limiting the resale or transfer of motor vehicle or driver records. There's an exception of sorts for media, but it wouldn't be worth much if the research tools became unavailable. And, for reasons of principle, the legislature shouldn't be closing records to the public in general and making exceptions for favored groups, even if we in the media are among them. This bill is a bad idea.

In another situation, lawmakers are eager to expand public access. House Bill 1232 would require the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to post on the Internet information about sex offenders, including a picture. That information is available now, but only locally. But the distinction between public access in person and public access online is false. As much information as possible should be public, and everything that is public should be accessible in the most convenient way.

As with other potentially dangerous possessions, good public policy would punish people who abuse them, rather than disarming people who don't.

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