The Life and Death of Public Records
By Terry Allen, In These Times
Posted on February 21, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/32242/

Sometimes it's the small abuses scurrying below radar that reveal how
profoundly the Bush administration has changed America in the name of
national security. Buried within the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism
Prevention Act of 2004 is a regulation that bars most public access to
birth and death certificates for 70 to 100 years. In much of the
country, these records have long been invaluable tools for activists,
lawyers and reporters to uncover patterns of illness and pollution
that officials miss or ignore.

In These Times has obtained a draft of the proposed regulations now
causing widespread concern among state officials. It reveals plans to
create a vast database of vital records to be centralized in
Washington and details measures that states must implement -- and pay
millions for -- before next year's scheduled implementation.

The draft lays out how some 60,000 already strapped town and county
offices must keep the birth and death records under lock and key and
report all document requests to Washington. Individuals who show up in
person will still be able to obtain their own birth certificates and,
in some cases, the birth and death records of an immediate relative,
and "legitimate" research institutions may be able to access files.
But reporters and activists won't be allowed to fish through records,
many family members looking for genetic clues will be out of luck, and
people wanting to trace adoptions will dead-end. If you are homeless
and need your own birth certificate, forget it: no address, no
service.

Consider the public health implications. A few years back, a doctor in
a tiny Vermont town noticed that two patients who lived on the same
hill had ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease. Hearing rumors of more cases of
the relatively rare and always fatal disease, the doctor notified the
health department. Citing lack of resources, it declined to
investigate. The doc then told a reporter, who searched the death
certificates filed in the town office only to find that ALS had
already killed five of the town's 1,300 residents. It was
statistically possible, but unlikely, that this
10-times-higher-than-normal incidence was simply chance. Since no one
knows what causes ALS, clusters like this one, once revealed, help
epidemiologists assess risk factors, warn doctors to watch for
symptoms,and alert neighbors and activists.

Activists in Colorado already know what it is like when states bar
access to vital records. For years, they fought the Cotter Corp.,
claiming that its uranium mining operations were killing residents and
workers. Unwilling to rely on the health department, which they
claimed had a "cozy" relationship with the polluters, the activists
tried to access death records, only to be told that it was illegal in
this closed-records state. An editorial in Colorado's Longmont Daily
Times-Call lamented, "If there's a situation that makes the case for
why death certificates should be available to the public, it is th[is]
Superfund area."

Some of state officials around the country are questioning whether the
new regulations themselves illegally tread on states' rights. But the
feds have been coy. Richard McCoy, public health statistic chief in
Vermont, one of the nation's 14 open-records states, says, "No state
is mandated to meet the regs. However, if they don't, then residents
of that state will not be able to access any federal services,
including social security and passports. States have no choice."

But while the public loses access to records, the federal government
gains a gargantuan national database easily cross-referenced in the
name of national security. The feds' claim that increased security
will deter identity theft and terrorism is facile. Wholesale corporate
data gathering is the major nexis of identity theft. As for terrorism,
all the 9/11 perpetrators had valid identification.

Meanwhile, the quiet clampdown on vital records is part of a growing
consolidation of information at the federal level. "That information
will dovetail with the Real ID Act of 2005," says Marc Rotenberg of
the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "Real ID cards are the
other shoe that is scheduled to drop in three years." That act, signed
into law last May, establishes national standards for state-issued
driver's licenses and ID cards, and centralizes the information into a
database.

Aside from public health and privacy concerns, closing vital records
incurs a steep intangible cost: It undermines community in places
where that healthy ethos still survives. In small town America, the
local clerk's office is a sociable place where government wears the
face of your neighbor. Each year, Vermont's 246 towns distribute their
vital statistics to all residents. "It's the first place everybody
goes in the Town Report," says state archivist Gregory Sanford. "Who
was born, who died, who got married, who had a baby and wasn't
married."

This may not be the most dramatic danger to democracy, but it is one
of the Bush administration's many quiet, incremental assaults on the
health of America's body politic. And it may end up listed on the
death certificate for open society.