June 30, 2010
By SETH AUGENSTEIN
SPARTA — A local activist’s recent public records request resulted in some extra information — including some personal Social Security numbers, and some federal tax identification numbers.
Jesse Wolosky, a well-known Sparta activist who recently lost a bid for a township council seat, put in a request for a list of vendors to the Sparta Board of Education, board President Jennifer Dericks said.
However, the list including redacted confidential information — such as the Social Security and tax identification numbers — got switched with the documents that still had all the information intact. The extra information was sent to Wolosky.
“The wrong list got sent out,” Dericks said. “It was an error; it was a mistake. It was a bad one.”
The mistake was not a widescale security breach, like computer hacking, Dericks said; instead, the leak of information is limited to Wolosky.
She said the school district sent Wolosky a letter asking for the return of the numbers; it also informed him any use of the information would be a breach of Open Public Records Act rules.
The law precludes government records custodians from giving out personal, sensitive or otherwise compromising information about public employees.
Wolosky called the Social Security number release a “bad government practice.”
“These are the people who educate and protect our children, and they can’t even protect our Social Security numbers,” he said.
Wolosky declined to give further specifics on the extent of personal data he received. He said he had no plans to use any of the information for any purpose.
John Paff, the chairman of the Open Government Advocacy Project of the New Jersey Libertarian Party, said the Sparta schools had “violated OPRA” when it came to releasing the sensitive information.
“They’re not supposed to release this stuff, but office errors do happen,” Paff said.
“It highlights the need for custodians to be careful — once the genie’s out of the bottle, there’s no getting it back in,” he added.
