Bill Phillips: Sunshine Troublemaker of the Week

I’d like to introduce you to Bill Phillips, who is this week’s Sunshine Troublemaker of the Week.

Phillips lives in Pulaski County, Arkansas, which is where all the trouble began.

Pat O’Brien is Pulaski’s county clerk. Mr. O’Brien has posted what this newspaper describes as “tens of thousands of circuit court records containing Social Security numbers and other personal data … [including] … bank account numbers, birth dates and check images.”

Until July of this year, Mr. O’Brien also posted the real estate records of county residents, which contained similarly detailed personal information. O’Brien was finally ordered by the state’s attorney general to remove those records, but even with that, Mr. O’Brien has declined to remove the personal information from circuit court records.

Well, you can’t fight the man, right?

Mr. Phillips does seem to have found a way, though. He FOIA’d the e-mails records of the county clerk’s office and is posting what he got on his website, Pulaski Watch.

(Be still my beating heart) and thus immediately earned the highly prestigious and coveted STOTW award from our otherwise modest organization, the Lucy Burns Institute.