For over a year now, I've been telling officials of the link between online records and identity theft. Maricopa County Arizona was one of the first counties to put their records online. Identity thieves were just as quick to harvest this rich resource. Now the officials in Maricopa county are admitting the move to publish online was a reckless error and are scrambling for damage control.

County Rife with Identity Theft Reconsiders Online Records

In 1997, Arizona’s Maricopa County (which includes Phoenix) became the first government entity in the nation to post public records online. The decision to post a blizzard of records, including land purchases, election information, tax information, divorce cases and much more, garnered praise from the local press and won Maricopa a place in the Smithsonian’s prestigious National IT Innovation Collection. But it has come back to bite the county in a most unpleasant way: Maricopa now claims the highest rate of identity theft in the nation, and local IT officials say the two statistics are inextricably linked.

Maricopa County, Dymalski says, is now rethinking its kitchen-sink approach to online records, and . . .

“This is not just a Maricopa and Arizona problem,” said Dymalski, alluding to the fact that Arizona ranks the highest in identity theft of any state in the nation. “This is a national problem.”

Such information, which can be plucked from anywhere in the world just by going online to county sites like Maricopa’s, was ripe for abuse by identity thieves. Read the whole story