Nine Illinois State Employees Face Suspension for Accessing Obama's Address

GAO did a good audit several years ago about state and county governments using social security numbers in public documents.

The state are required to obtain the social security number to make future enforcement of child support payments easier. They need to devise a method other than plastering the number on every document.

Congress did not take any actions to protect the SSN.

Another major source for obtaining social security numbers is a doctor's office. I have read a case about an employee at a doctors office stealing someone's identity.

Contact Congress about your privacy. Tell them to not use the SSN in any huge health care database

I can look up anyone's address, by name, through my county's online property information site. It's public information. This is a tempest in a teapot; in a few weeks, we'll all know his address anyway -- unless he plans to keep that secret too.

Obama should take a polygraph test.

I am not condoning employees accessing sensitive information, but I cannot believe that one of the many free lookups wouldn't have his address.

The state of Missouri and some counties put all kinds of information online. In my county the personal property and homes detail are all online free of charge.

The search in my county allows partial name searches or searches by addresses. Everything exposed about Joe the Plumber is available for the public in my state.

The purchase of a home includes the actual associated documents that were completed. The documents include the price, down payment, whether a person is married or single, etc

It is time people started complaining more about privacy.

In my state, anyone can request a court file because they are public records. No ID or logging occurs. Divorce records have social security numbers, bank account numbers, etc

It makes stealing idenitity very easy.

Jake,
Since you've also been following the Joe the Plumber data breach you might be interested in the Columbia Dispatch article about it today. It's about the whistleblower, and what she says happened with the agency trying to cover it up. One quote: "He then told me that we needed to make sure that we answer questions about what happened the same way, so that our versions were not different from each other. Before he said that, he reminded me that I was an unclassified employee -- which, as you may know, is someone who can be fired without cause."

You are very easily upset, Question. And who says I was talking about MY address and MY driver's license? How would you feel about IRS employees snooping around in your tax records, hmmmm? Or don't you think the government extracts financial information from us, either?

But in any case, my state benevolently allows it's citizens to pay extra money to keep their street address information private. I assume that Illinois does as well, and that Obama availed himself of that option.
Do you disagree that it should be illegal for public employees to snoop that information, and that examples should be made of those who do it anyhow?

Sorry about the typos; you upset me :)

I am sooooo sick of people complaining about "the government", or even talking about it as if it were some giant monster. Bridget, your government did not 'extract' anything from you. You volunteered that information! In this case, we are talking about the Department of Motor Vehicle, so the only information the DMV has of you has been given you them by you. You did it when you went to get a driver's licenses to drive on the road that the big bad government built.

They are stupid employees in Illinosis

All they had to do was look at the Rezko House deal with obama on the internet.

It goes to you how ubiquitous tracking is on computers, whether they're at work or in your home. Privacy is becoming so very old fashioned, I'm afraid.

They should be all fired!!!

WestCoastMessenger weights in: clear misue of the government's resources, which includes the compensation to the employees who were using said resources for non-productive purposes. As a Democrat I'm not particularly opposed to taxes, I just want to realize a productive return out of my tax investment. This is not it.

As I said in the case of the employees of the State of Ohio and Joe the Plumber, public employees should be held to the highest ethical standards with regards to the information our governments extract from us. Violations of confidentiality should be taken much more seriously than they are. Calling these people goofy busy-bodies and suspending them for a couple of days won't deter this sort of behavior. They should lose their jobs.

Why such difference in Joe the Plumber privacy invasion and Barack Obama privacy invasion? Not fare... Is this United States of America or Russia?

Come January, everybody will know where he lives. Might as well not let 3 day's worth of state work suffer over this.