Port: North Dakota’s courts are making digital records access more complicated than it has to be

MINOT — In January of 2020, the North Dakota Supreme Court

launched online access to court records.

Previously, you could search for criminal and civil court records in an online database, but to get actual copies of the records, you had to be in contact with the courts.

The new system allowed any internet user to download digital copies of those files.

It was a mess.

An absolute dumpster fire.

One reader

reported to me at the time that,

thanks to a $30 traffic ticket, his date of birth, home address, driver’s license number and Social Security number were all freely available to any internet rando who cared to look.

It was a bonanza for identity thieves and fraudsters, and that wasn’t the worst of it. I was able to find

gruesome crime scene photos

and even unserved

search warrants in active criminal investigations

with just a few clicks of my mouse.

Two days after I wrote about these problems, the courts took records access offline. More than three years later, it still isn’t back, with State Court Administrator Sally Holewa

telling the Bismarck Tribune

that there aren’t any plans to bring it back.

She said it hasn’t been the job of court clerks to ensure that private information is properly redacted from public documents, and that the clerks don’t want the job for liability reasons. This leaves the courts unsure how to reinstitute access to historical records without creating massive security concerns for thousands upon thousands of North Dakotans.

All of the information I described above is still available to the public, by the way, just not through the internet. This still isn’t great, but at least someone looking to access this private information with untoward motivations would have to drive down to your local courthouse and get the records in person.

The courts should fix that problem, but they’ll argue (not unreasonably) that they don’t have the money or the staffing to do it, and the Legislature is unlikely to give it to them, so it remains that your Social Security number and other personal information may be illegally available to the public down at the local courthouse, thanks to the lackadaisical attitude toward this stuff from law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, etc.

That’s the conundrum we’re facing over historical court records. But what is stopping the courts from picking a reasonable date in the future when newly created court records, that would hopefully have the appropriate redactions, would be available online?

Yes, that would mean newer records would be easier to access than older records, but as anyone who has ever done a records search at a courthouse knows — and I’ve done more than I could count — that’s already how it works. The older the record you’re trying to find, the more likely it is to be located in some musty, dusty corner at the bottom of a box pile.

In a perfect world, all of North Dakota’s public records would be digitized and available online for the public, but since we’re obliged to live in the real world, the least we could do is create that sort of digital access in the future.