Fourth Circuit Decides First Amendment Trumps Social Security Number Privacy

Fourth Circuit Decides First Amendment Trumps Social Security Number Privacy

By KASHMIR HILL, Above the Law Blog, 27 Jul 2010 at 4:59 PM 4TH

Court clerks in Virginia may be shaking their fists at the Fourth Circuit today. In an interesting ruling on free speech, privacy, and public records, the court ruled that an angry blogger has the right to publish public officials’ and court clerks’ Social Security numbers in order to protest the fact that Virginia puts records online that publish citizens’ social security numbers. We skimmed the opinion, but didn’t see a citation to Hammurabi.

B.J. Ostergren has been writing TheVirginiaWatchdog.com since 2003 to bring attention to the fact that state governments play fast and loose with people’s Social Security numbers when putting land records online. Her advocacy got many of them to actually start attempting to redact SSNs from the documents before putting them online, but the system was still imperfect.

For full text of the article, visit Fourth Circuit Decides First Amendment Trumps Social Security Number Privacy « Above the Law: A Legal Tabloid – News, Gossip, and Colorful Commentary on Law Firms and the Legal Profession.

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