Hill aides worry about ID theft

by Frank James

Identity theft is, by all accounts, a vast and growing problem. Congress knows this full well since lawmakers have held any number of hearings on the subject and there's an uproar on Capitol Hill everytime it's discovered that a government laptop with personal information on thousands of Americans has gone missing or some other lapse occurs.

All of which makes it curious that Congress itself made public the sensitive personal information of of numerous legislative aides by not redacting beforehand the information on required financial-disclosure documents.

According to a story in the Hill newspaper:

Furious senior House aides are demanding committee action against a website that has posted their bank account numbers, signatures, home addresses and children’s names that are included in financial disclosure documents.

Some are demanding legal action against the website LegiStorm, which since February has been posting congressional documents online as a way to increase transparency in government. Aides have brought their complaints to the House Administration Committee and the clerk of the House

Staffers, however, are unsatisfied so far and say they may protest by refusing to turn in personal disclosure forms by the May 15 deadline. They worry the online information could lead to identify theft or their being targeted by criminals, and some are pleading for intervention from lawyers at the House General Counsel’s office.

“No one has a problem with disclosure,” said Jeff Loveing, chief of staff to Rep. Bill Shuster (R-Pa.). “What we’re talking about is a concern for our safety, our financial safety and our children’s safety,” he said. “I’ve researched identity theft and how much of a goldmine this information is for people who deal in that world.”

Loveing argued that the House and Senate could have a “liability problem” if someone used the information to commit a crime.

The story continues to say that the head of LegiStorm, the outfit that posted the information on its website, doesn't have much sympathy in the matter.

LegiStorm founder Jock Friedly has refused to remove the names of children, home addresses and staffers’ signatures. In defending his company, he said it is up to the House and Senate to remove information from the forms if it is sensitive.

“If they fell down on their jobs, it’s not our fault,” he said.

In a posting on its website, LegiStorm actually outlines some positive actions it's taken to satisfy the aggrieved staff members:

- We have voluntarily gone to significant lengths and costs already to scrub the most sensitive of information released due to staffer slipups and ethics committee oversight. This includes investment account numbers and Social Security numbers. We did so without delay.

- We have voluntarily provided various security measures such as user registration and authentication, a legal warning (one that is not present on two other heavily trafficked web sites that have for years provided member of Congress disclosures), and a human response system to make sure that automated bots cannot access the data.

All these measures by us that are not legally required present an enormous burden for us as a company that for all intents and purposes has no existing revenue stream (our advertising on our entire site brings in less than $10 a day despite the notion by some staffers that we are raking in lots of money from the public service of releasing this data free to all users). And now House chiefs of staff want us to review thousands of individual filings to redact more things that they voluntarily put into the public record and are in most cases readily available from other public sources, including the telephone book?

There are three ready solutions if the House is genuine about its desire to protect staffers.

1) The House will make minor changes to the financial disclosure form so that the signature and address of staffers is disclosed only to the House and is not released publicly.

2) The House will review these forms for inadvertent disclosures.

3) The House should pay – only out-of-pocket costs, with no overhead or profit – for us to redact the past disclosures to their liking, assuming the redactions have no significant public disclosure consequences.

This solution would certainly save the taxpayers over the alternative of the House foolishly bringing the frivolous lawsuit that many chiefs of staff appear to demand.

That sounds reasonable.