OK – Dangers of Data Sharing
Thirty-six state legislators share the same names as 206 felons who are listed in an Oklahoma Department of Corrections database, a Tulsa World computer-aided analysis indicates. Reported by Tulsa World.
The list of felons whose names match those of state lawmakers includes six murderers, four rapists, 58 burglars and 17 embezzlers, to name a few.
While none of the current state lawmakers are felons,
determining the background of any future political candidates or other public employees with any certainty would be more difficult if a bill introduced this year becomes law, government openness advocates say.
Senate Bill 1753 by Sen. Debbe Leftwich, D-Oklahoma City, has triggered a debate regarding limiting access to certain public employee records.
Leftwich has said she authored the bill, which would make secret public employees’ birth dates, over identity theft concerns. The Oklahoma Public Employees Association and State Troopers Association favor the bill.
The state’s two largest newspapers — the Tulsa World and The Oklahoman — and the Oklahoma Press Association have argued against passage of the bill.
OPA lobbyist Mark Thomas has said keeping public employees’ dates of birth public is critical to the media. Reporters
use birth dates to confirm or exclude individuals when researching public employees’ pasts.The bill, if approved, also would nullify a recent opinion issued by the state attorney general’s office, which indicated that state agencies should assume that birth dates are public unless the state Open Records Act or other pertinent statutes close them.
The Dec. 8 opinion indicates “since dates of birth are not declared by the Legislature to be confidential, the presumption of the law is that they are public and should be released upon request.”
The public employees’ union has argued that the dates of birth should be made secret to protect workers’ personal safety and their identity from theft. In arguing for closure of the records, the association has not cited a single case in which an employee’s identity was stolen using public records.
The state Open Records Act already keeps secret several types of records related to public employees. The list of confidential records includes public employees’ home addresses, telephone numbers, Social Security numbers, work evaluations, internal personnel investigations and payroll deductions.
News organizations routinely use birth dates when examining large computerized lists of public employees’ names and comparing them with computerized prison and arrest records. The World has used the process to help identify felons who worked with vulnerable populations such as school bus drivers and nursing home employees.
Birth dates were utilized in a 1998 Tulsa World series that identified more than 200 school employees who had past brushes with the law.
A former Tulsa World reporter who worked on the series, now on the Washington Post investigative staff, said making dates of birth secret will make it harder for news organizations to do their jobs and may have unintended consequences.
“Every time lawmakers whittle away at access to public records, it gets more difficult for journalists to report fully — and accurately — on the workings of government,” said the former World reporter, David S. Fallis.
Leaving dates of birth public also protects public employees with common names from being linked to others who may have past criminal records, Fallis said. As an example, having just a first and last name would lead to three dozen state lawmakers’ names being matched with 206 state felons.
House member Mike Brown has the distinction of perhaps having one of the more common names among legislators. So it should come as no surprise that there are 68 Michael Browns who are Oklahoma felons.
Sometimes having a middle name doesn’t distinguish either. There are seven Michael R. Browns who share the same middle initial as the lawmaker.
Even having a year of birth does not always help distinguish two people. There are two Michael Browns who are felons and share the same year of birth as the non-felon legislator. One of the felon Michael Browns with the same birth year is a murderer. Rep. Brown, D-Tahlequah, could not be reached for comment.
Joey Senat, an associate professor of journalism at Oklahoma State University and former president of FOI Oklahoma Inc., said the felon-legislator matching exercise “demonstrates you can be mistaken for someone who has committed a crime if you have the same name.”
“So having that date of birth as a secondary identifier, it’s a way to distinguish between people,” Senat said. “And in the end it protects your privacy.”
Senat said FOI Oklahoma, a freedom of information organization, doesn’t dismiss the identity theft problem.
“But the reality is, we’ve got a lot of experts that say a date of birth is not going to be used to steal a person’s identity,” Senat said. Ironically, birth dates already are easily obtainable for most lawmakers.
The Oklahoma Almanac, produced by the state Department of Libraries, includes biographical information submitted by every current state lawmaker. Eighty-five percent of the 149 members of the Legislature included their full date of birth with their self-contributed biographies.
Bill Young, public information manager for the libraries department, said he was not aware of any identity theft issues or other problems that have arisen from the publication of the lawmakers’ birth dates, which are not requested by the almanac’s editors.
The bill awaits action in the House after it was approved Feb. 18 by a 44-0 vote in the Senate. If passed by the House, the measure will return to the Senate for consideration
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