California restricts access to complete birth, death records

By The Associated Press

09.29.02

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Access to complete copies of California's birth and death record indices will be limited to prevent identity thieves from gaining private information under a bill signed Sept. 25 by Gov. Gray Davis.

The bill by state Sen. Jackie Speier, D-Daly City, arose after the senator demonstrated in a Senate hearing last year how she could go to an online genealogy site and find her mother's maiden name.

Because that is a common identifier at banks, that could lead to identity theft, Speier said.

Not everyone agrees, especially genealogists and adoptees seeking birth records.

"It is a terrible precedent," said Terry Francke, general counsel for the California First Amendment Coalition. "There was no demonstrated harm. And I mean none."

Speier's bill prohibits the state from selling CD-ROMs of the birth index that contains mothers' maiden names, and the death index that contains Social Security numbers. The public will be able to access and buy the edited indices.

"The state intends to go back and redact all the mothers' maiden names from the 24 million records," said Richard Steffen, Speier's staff director. That's what many other states do, he said.

Because the state had previously sold copies of index listing births up to 1995, the list is available through other sources for an adoptee seeking family information, said Jean Uhrich, of Bastard Nation, a nationwide organization for adoptee rights.

"Those adoptees born after 1995 have been severed from their history," she said. To get that information, they'll have to petition the court and ask to have the records opened, Uhrich said.

Another Speier bill signed Sept. 25 limits the issuance of certified birth certificates. Under this bill, individuals can get a certified copy of a birth certificate, and so can their immediate family and law enforcement and others who are authorized. But anyone not authorized will get only an informational copy that clearly states it cannot be used to establish identity.

Uhrich said her organization supported that bill, because "identity theft can spring from birth certificates, but that's a very different document from the indices."

The Speier bills were among 14 identity theft bills signed by Davis on Sept. 25.

Not all identity theft cases are for financial gain, said Assemblyman Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto. His bill aims to help people whose names were fraudulently used by suspects in criminal cases.

In those cases, someone arrested for a crime gives the wrong name, which gets entered into the law enforcement database and criminal court records. Victims are often unaware there's an outstanding arrest warrant naming them until it comes up on a background search or during a routine traffic stop, he said.

And once the error was discovered, it was nearly impossible to have the innocent victim's name removed from the database of bail-jumpers, criminals and suspects, said Linda Foley, executive director of the Identity Theft Resource Center.

The bill lets the court clear up the confusion over the names on its own, without requiring the victim to hire a lawyer and start legal proceedings, Simitian said.

It also provides a process to have the case flagged with information showing that the victim's name was used fraudulently, he said.

"This makes it much easier for someone to clear their good name if they've been the victim of identity theft in the criminal arena," Simitian said.