Franklin County (OH) Muncipal Court is another in a long line of government organizations that violate citizens’ privacy by exposing personal information on their websites.

The Constitutional framers had it right:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.  

Some counties recognize this.

See County Web Site Helped Thieves Steal Identities of Victims in Five States for details of Franklin County's disastrous failures. Some of the article is excerpted below:

Police in Worthington Ohio say hundreds of people in five states are the latest victims of identity theft that has resulted from county officials publishing sensitive information about citizens over the Internet. They've asked the U.S. Secret Service to investigate the link between the county Web site and online identity theft.

The known victims of this latest breach are from Ohio, South Carolina, Kentucky, Texas and Wyoming. Although no one has been arrested yet, Worthington police seized the records and computers of two people, who implicated four others and the county Web site in the scheme.  

Ohio law requires that some court records are made public but does not require officials to publish any of the records online where the information can be used by criminals worldwide.

Now that the county has published your sensitive information online, local officials say they will try to locate anyone affected by the breach, but place the burden on individuals to take steps to protect themselves. They suggest verifying information in credit reports and keeping constant vigilance over your account.

Better to keep constant vigilance over the Bill of Rights and government officials. 

The Help America Vote Act – pushed thru Congress by convicted felon Bob Ney – requires states to develop and maintain centralized, computerized voter registration databases. 

This is one of a series of Congressional Acts since 2001 that strip Americans of their basic rights under the U.S. Constitution. Under HAVA, $3.9 billion was provided to states to deploy hackable computerized voting systems which obscure the vote count from the public.

How convenient for dishonest government officials and hackers.  The Big Brother scheme provides name, address, party affiliation, and vote frequency of every registered voter.

Coupling centralized, computerized voter registration databases with secret vote counting (via machine) is a perfect recipe for tyranny.  Stalin must be dancing in his grave over U.S. elections.

Updated June 27, 2008.