North Adams Alerting Persons in SS Number Release
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — City Hall is sending out 419 letters to individuals who received some form of compensation from the city using their Social Security number.
The numbers were inadvertently included in a public records request made by Michael Milazzo regarding airport operations. Milazzo returned a thumb drive that included the file to the Police Department.
"We will notify those people. We are working on a letter. We're working on setting up the credit monitoring," Mayor Jennifer Macksey said, speaking to the press on Monday. "We will do whatever we have to do. But again, right now we've only disclosed that information to one individual."
The mayor said she was thankful Milazzo returned the file but recognized that the city had erred in allowing it to be included without redactions. She repeated several times that the file had only been released to Milazzo and she could only confirm the thumb drive had been returned.
A query to Milazzo's lawyer, who had spoken with the city public records officer Marya Kozik, had not been returned by publication. This article will be updated with any response.
"It should not have happened, and we all recognize that we're not trying to hide anything, but we will do the right thing and protect these 419 individuals," the mayor said.
It is not illegal to disclose Social Security numbers with the exceptions such as they are being used for fraud or be publicly posted. The numbers are used widely for governmental and financial actions.
Milazzo posted on Facebook on Thursday that he received "private confidential records" from the city in response to a public records request. He claimed the information had been sent to an artificial intelligence firm as a data breach.
"I am sharing this information because I believe people have a right to know when their personal identifying information may have been disclosed and should have the opportunity to find out exactly what happened, protect themselves, and obtain professional advice regarding their rights," he wrote.
The file was created for Tyler Technologies, formerly MUNIS, the city's software provider for certain public services, as part of a data transition. It included the names, addresses and Social Security numbers for people who have provided some service to the city and most likely received a 1099 form for tax purposes.
"It could be our referees, people who keep score at basketball games, people who umpire, people who play their banjo at the farmers market, people who play at the Windsor Lake," the mayor said.
In addition to alerting the individuals that their Social Security numbers were released in the public records request, the mayor said the city is lining up a credit monitoring service to track that the numbers are not fraudulently used.
Milazzo had taken to Facebook on Thursday to claim that the numbers were released in a data breach. There was no "breach," in that an outside entity did not hack the city's systems.
Rather, the public records request he submitted for "Airport Manager, airport business operations, aviation-related services, the airport restaurant, and related matters" returned names within that vendor file.
City officials said the total volume of records released to Milazzo on July 22 was 86 gigabytes, or about 20,000 pages.
A separate records request from Starbridge, a public sector vendor platform run on artificial intelligence systems, for vendor information did not include anyone on the small vendor list, said the mayor.
She said the city will be using encrypted data moving forward but noted the size of the request and the ability to review it in light of an uptick in requests. Kozik is the records officer in addition to her role as community development director; the mayor said this makes her want a designated person.
"Back in the day we only used to get public records requests during election season, and if we got three a year, now we get three a day," Macksey said. "Now we get 30 a day. In a week's time, we could have 10 different requests going."
She put it down to a distrust in government and the assumption government is not being transparent, as well as AI companies trying to build up their data.
"But we have some disgruntled people within the city who just hammer us with public records requests," the mayor said. "Mr. Milazzo is fixated with the airport and thinks that we're doing something underhanded, and we're not. We're running the airport."
She added that this has been a continuing saga and that "those people who live in glass houses should not throw stones."
Tags: public records, social security,
