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Message 00319: a save



I may have a way out of this. I'm a newspaper. You're an anonymous whistleblower (at least at first, simply because I'd like to protect you from morons). We are disclosing the privacy breach of 2860 files with SSNs in them. You gathered the master files independently, but only gave them to me, so it isn't like you did it at my direction or did it for profit. As a public media source, I've scanned them, and found real problems.

I have a letter from the head of the Judicial Conference rules committee, Judge Rosenthal, thanking me for my previous scan of court of appeals decisions ... this is one of those secret projects I've been working on. I went after all 9 circuits and sent the chief judges letters with her as the prime addressee ... the thanked me for my "empirical evidence" and four clerks wrote back that they had removed the offending case. I will write her back thanking her for thanking me and presenting the results of the district court level audit and point out the issues with the current system .... there is no mechanism for people to let them know they have an issue with their data. I will recommend that the administrative office of the courts hire a Chief Privacy Officer in order to deal with these issues.

If they want to go after you, I'll shield you as long as I can, but at the end of the day, we'll simply agree that you did what you did. There was not an explicit rule against what you did. It was pretty stupid, I think, but the motive was good. If the AO of the courts wants to come up with more specific rules, then that is their right.

I don't want to have to do this again, so you're going to have to agree to behave when it comes to interaction with my boxes if we do this and I go to bat for you ... the purpose was good, but you definitely went over the line, even after I specifically told you I didn't want that to happen on my resources. You would have to agree to stay anonymous as long as that is useful to the cause ... I want full control over how this gets rolled out and presented.

Carl