A ruling, but the Social Security numbers game continues

A ruling, but the Social Security numbers game continues

A unanimous 3-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, a federal appeals court governing Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, West Virginia and Maryland, ruled that privacy advocate BJ Ostergren could not be punished under a law prohibiting the publication of Social Security numbers legally obtained from public records.

Ostergren wants the government to stop putting SSNs on public records. To grab the attention of the public and the policymakers, Ostergren goes to clerks of court and subscribes to their land-records access service. She hunts for records of prominent people, and if she finds that person’s SSN, she posts a copy of the whole land record on her website.

Ostergren’s practice ran afoul of §59.1-443.2, which prohibits the intentional communication of another person’s SSN to the general public, so she sued to block enforcement of the law against her.

The 4th Circuit agreed with the lower court that the prohibition infringed on Ostergren’s right of free speech to protest the Commonwealth’s policy of allowing full SSNs to be made available online.

The appeals court went one step further than the lower court, though, and said Ostergren’s free speech rights were affected when she published records of both famous people and private citizens.The appeals court also blamed Virginia for creating the problem in the first place. When it created the subscription service for land records, and in subsequent amendments, it mandated that SSNs be redacted from all land records in the future, but did not make activation of the new subscription services dependent on prior redaction (nor did it appropriate any money to accomplish the task).

The case is still not over. The appeals court remanded to the lower court for further development of proper injunctive relief.

To read the full text of the opinion on the 4th Circuit’s website, click here.