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Officials likely abuse access to government info databases on a daily basis.
Every so often we hear or read news reports about a municipal government official—a police officer, a DMV clerk, et cetera—using access to databases of citizen information for unauthorized and often very illegal purposes. We’ve seen them use personal information to stalk ex-lovers, track down potential romantic interests, and even to facilitate identity theft.
In this age where both the federal government and municipal law enforcement agencies are deliberately attempting to collect more and more data about us, the Associated Press attempted to investigate how frequently government officials misuse their access to citizen information. The results of their investigation were published today.
What they’ve found is unsurprisingly concerning—and very, very incomplete. The AP requested reports of incidences of database misuse from all 50 states and three dozen large municipal police departments. Over just two years they determined there were at least 650 cases where an employee or police officer was fired, suspended or otherwise disciplined for inappropriately accessing and using information from government databases.
The Associated Press acknowledges that these numbers are woefully undercounted due to lack of reliable recordkeeping and are likely much, much higher. And how many cases of unauthorized access don’t even get caught? When we spread these numbers out over time, what this essentially means is that every single day a government official somewhere is inappropriately looking up information about citizens in state or municipal databases.
The story describes many cases where police use databases to stalk people, often connected to romantic entanglements. Some cases revolve around simple curiosity—like looking up information about celebrities. These are bad enough examples on their own. There are some other examples provided, though, that highlight situations where officials and officers were—in what appears to be an organized fashion—using access to database information to snoop on and even intimidate its critics.
In one case in Minnesota, a county commissioner discovered that law enforcement and government officials had repeatedly searched databases for information about her and her family members. These searches came after she criticized county spending and programs of the sheriff’s department. In Miami-Dade County in Florida, a highway trooper found herself stalked and threatened by police after she pulled an officer over for speeding in 2011, assisted with information about her from the state’s driver databases.