From a letter from Senator Ron Wyden to John Roberts, the Chief Justice:
I write with concern that federal courts are failing in their legal obligations to protect Americans’ private information, putting Americans at needless risk of identify theft, stalking and other harms. Each year, federal courts make available to the public court filings containing tens of thousands of Americans’ personal information, such as their Social Security Numbers (SSNs) and dates of birth. However, federal court rules — required by Congress — mandate that court filings be scrubbed of personal information before they are publicly available. These rules are not being followed, the courts are not enforcing them, and as a result, cach year tens of thousands of Americans are exposed to needless privacy violations.
The Judicial Conference, the courts’ policy-making body, has known about this problem for at least a decade and has refused to act. …
The most recent report, which was provided to my office in draft form, says the Federal Judicial Center (FIC), the courts’ research arm, has twice studied the problem of personal data appearing in public court records, in 2010 and 2015, and in both cases found significant violations of the judiciary’s privacy rules. In the most recent study, the FIC examined 3.9 million court records filed duringa one month period in 2013. It found 5,437 of these documents included one or more SSNs. If these statistics are representative of the problem, it would mean that the courts have made available to the public roughly half a million documents containing personal data since 2015. …
I hope this isn’t happening in Social Security cases. Many, many years ago we used to put the claimant’s Social Security number in the case caption but those days are long gone.
Note: This is something unique to the Supreme Court.
ReplyDeleteCM/ECF PACER for most District and Appeals Courts have these removed and are on a separate page. Example, all PII other than name and residence for bankruptcy petitions are listed on a separate page, removed the submission and then indexed into the docket.
This is more or less how disjointed the administrative staff at SCOTUS as no other federal court I am aware of has this anymore. And the District Courts have been doing this since 2001, possibly earleir.
This is a waste of ink (or I guess pixels here). I doubt SCOTUS will care or do anything. The majority of SCOTUS' attitude now is the public be damned.
ReplyDelete@5:11pm It's sad that SCOTUS is so poorly run and has folks who only seem to care about making decisions based on politics and not the law.
ReplyDeleteI’m sure somehow SSA will be ultimately be blamed for this since they issue the SSN’s.
ReplyDeleteThe case files for federal claimants are open to anybody who views cases at a public terminal, even though those same documents are not accessible to non-parties on pacer.
ReplyDelete