Free Republic

A Virginia privacy advocate can post public records containing Social Security numbers of private citizens as well as government officials on her website, a federal appeals court ruled Monday. The court agreed with B.J. Ostergren's claim that a 2008 state law prohibiting anyone from making Social Security numbers available to the public violated her First Amendment rights. Ostergren posts the records on her website, TheVirginiaWatchdog.com, to publicize her message that governments are mishandling Social Security numbers and to prod them to correct the problem. Many of the documents are Virginia land records that court clerks have made available on government...

It is the nine-digit key to your life - and B.J. Ostergren has more than 18,000 of them. For the past four years, the 57-year-old former insurance adjuster has lost sleep to gain boxes crammed with public records, many plucked from county clerks and recorders' Web sites. They have one golden kernel: Social Security numbers, usually partnered with enough information to open a fraudulent line of credit - or worse. From her home in Hanover County, Va., she writes and calls the holders of the numbers she turns up, many of whom did not know their records were online. Her...