MC-Clerk: County Clerk Website Wrongly Labels Cop A Criminal
(stlo here - Just watch this and read the rest of this post)
More sloppiness from the County Clerk. From RNews:
Ed and Shelley Camacho are renovating their house.
Before hiring contractors they checked the Monroe County Clerk’s website to make sure the people they hired were legitimate.
Then they typed in their own names on the site.
“I said, `You know you’re listed here with a criminal index number.’ He was listed as a criminal,” Shelley Camacho said.
“I was shocked. I was appalled to see that it even had me in the arrest book,” said Ed Camacho.
Ed Camacho has arrested dozens of people. He has never been arrested.
Camacho’s a retired Rochester police investigator and Vietnam veteran.
Because, you know, posting thousands of our Social Security Numbers online isn’t enough screwing up for the clerk’s office. There’s a pattern here:
“There’s no such thing as a perfect world, but I think we’re seeing a pattern here of not some minor issues, major problems,” exclaimed Dinolfo’s opponent, Democratic candidate Tom Hasman.
The current county clerk weighed in:
“We have a daily process. As our documents come in, we review those documents to ensure the integrity of those documents each and every day,” said Dinolfo.
That’s what she said when all the bad press about the Social Security numbers happened. Here’s a personal observation: when your process isn’t working, maybe you should change it.
Or, you could just change out the current County Clerk for someone who won’t potentially ruin people’s lives with her sloppiness.
The Camacho’s believe the burden of catching them, however, may fall more and more on all of us.
Because, you know, we all have lots of free time to keep tabs on what personal info or mis-information the County Clerk’s office is putting on the web for all to see. And isn’t that what the true meaning of the GOP’s “ownership society” really is? “We do what we want, you’re on your own.”
Hey, at least challenger Tom Hasman has provided a form that saves you from having to search the clerk’s website to see if you’re clear. The form sends a request to the clerk’s office to take any of your personal info down.
Related posts:
- County Clerk SSN Follow-up/Reminder
- “Insecurity” at the County Clerks’ office makes it to the County Legislature for consideration
- County Clerk: Unusual Moves from the Hasman Campaign
- Why Is The County Clerk Playing Chicken With Our Personal Info?
- The loss of your privacy is the cost of doing business at the County Clerk office
This has gone too far. Has Dinolfo ever heard of the word PUBLIC TRUST?
Elected officials are entrusted with the publics best interest. She has failed miserably over and over to prove that she is worthy of that trust.
To have to search to find out if your social security number is up there is bad. Because you can be almost guaranteed that your number is already on file with someone on the internet in a foreign country who has already sold it ten times over. It will be a matter of months or years before that comes back to bite people, and Dinolfo will long since been gone and nesting comfortably somewhere else in politics or retirement.
But it’s another to attach criminal files in error on retired police investigators and then not issue a public apology or even indicate that she is going to do a review to make certain this isn’t smattered throughout the site, or even offer the assurance that it won’t happen again.
Was it the dude who was blogging for her on the internet that just didn’t ‘have the time to do the job right? Or was it her own incompetence that just resonates over and over again that Dinolfo isn’t qualified to be County Clerk.
It took someone like Tom Hasman, a professional in security and records to point out the errors that would have gone unnoticed by the community if he had not run.
Tom Hasman deserves a big thanks from this community for what he’s already alerted us to by just RUNNING for the office of Clerk, and he deserves a bigger thanks from us by making certain we pull the lever to elect him on November 4th.
It’s a strange campaign when the challenger does more to protect the public DURING the campaign than the incumbent does while in office getting paid.
I urge everyone who cares about the security of our most personal information to elect Tom Hasman in November. We have the chance to have a clerk with the highest level of experience, education and professionalism representing us.
It’s about time.
Cheryl’s Michael “Brownie” Brownitude knows no bounds
We need to congratulate the D and C on its prescient endorsement for county clerk. Always a step ahead of the curve. Good endorsement of Dinolfo. Remember experts and leaders say everything is okay in Rachacha and all our public officials care about us, (unless we are the wrong party, race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, immigration status or pick your own category).
This is a message for Cheryl Dinolfo:
It’s more than a “little mistake” when a criminal judgement attached to your file lands you in the “Arrest Logs” as well.
This is a public request that you don’t wait for November 4th. Resign your position effective immediately. If you by chance *do* win this election, I’m going to start a public drive to have you removed from your position by the Governor based on the examples shown of your total incompetence.
Do the right thing Cheryl. Resign now and save yourself the disgrace of being removed. It’s a guarantee.
I was talking to a neighbor of mine earlier today who is a computer and networking professional and asked if he had heard about the social security mess and this new issue at the clerks website.
He told me that its incomprehensible that the clerk would ever have deployed a database online or offline without proper user permissions that would contain any data like social security information. Additionally he stated its “database 101″ that any scanned documents that are to then aggregate to a database that will be public accessed are scrubbed prior to scanning. Xerox “the document company” deals with these forms of information all the time.
On the latest issue of the police officer he stated to me that records being transposed in a database certainly can happen. However, he stated that usually if there is “one” there are probably many more if the data entry methodology utilized any form of automation.
While I understand some of this I do not understand all of it. Perhaps someone whos more technology savvy could explain it better.
If I am properly understanding what he said means that since the clerk used scanning and automation to get the information into a computer format where there is one there will be many when problems arise.
He told me that the social security numbers as example. First Dinolfo said a few hundred, then it turned into thousands.
In conclusion of our talk on the subject he told me that in business such breaches of private information would result in the entire recordset (?) affected being removed from access and scrubbed (?). That if other matters of reference integrity (?) were also affected (which he said this police officers issue displays) the entire database would have to come down.
He stated to me that when you have thousands of entries in a database affected whomever the database administrators are would instantly be fired as they effectively did not do their job proper resulting in damage to the end clients.
Basically if I get it all right what he said is that the county clerk acted completely irresponsibly?
What he also noted to me was when dealing with millions of documents and record information the county clerk offices are not capable of doing it proper and this is why we see this happening. For example, target merchandise stores do not “take care” of all credit card entries, they have a bank, visa card, master card etc. do it.
This makes alot of sense. In other words the county clerks office does not have the proper information technology staff ability to properly handle databases of this order of size and personal information and this is why we are seeing these problems.
Again while I understand good deal of this there is alot he said that I just dont get. Perhaps someone here can better relate it all?
You’ve got that right. Heck’uva job, Dinolofie!
Ok folks,
I spoke with my neighbor again about this database stuff and he clarified some things.
Professionals in the information business scrub or clean data up before it ever goes to what he called a production database. In the case of printed documents that are fed in bulk he said that optical character recognition software is used. Essentially areas of a document (or the entire thing) get translated from a graphic to a text like format. It can then be used for any number of things, indexes, searches and more.
He said for thousands of social security numbers to end up online they never performed this cleansing process and in not doing so shows a complete level of ignorance. From what he told me any first year college student in database technology is taught that data meant to be secure is to be cleansed first before every going into a database meant for public access or proper user permissions set for access levels.
What the clerks office did according to him would get them removed from any company in this country and it shows a complete lack of proper skill sets to manage such information in an online accessible format.
I asked him if he was surprised by the latest issue of a former police officers online records showing up and he said, “I’m not surprised at all, the social security issue in its own right proves that the clerks technology staff and/or contractors are not capable of dealing with this sort of responsibility. The cross indexing of records shows that the problems are far deeper than the community has been led to believe”…
Now it gets interesting….
He continued saying, “Tom Hasman works for SRA International which is a extremely well known information technology security firm that provides the highest levels of information security services to Federal Governments agencies, state agencies and much more.”
He told me that what he heard was Hasman offered to assist in getting through these issues and the clerks offices declined. With that said, I guess you’d be hard pressed to find a better person to help as SRA International is THE security company Government trusts!
He told me, “They did not want Hasman or SRA coming in to deal with this problem due to the results. That a high prospect exists that the clerks offices have many many more problems with all of the communities record keeping and that they are trying to cover up the complete lack of incompetence in dealing with this information critical to people, business and more. The LAST thing they want is a REAL security professional who works for a REAL security company that no less is contracted by numerous STATE and FEDERAL agencies to be looking in on what has happened at the clerks offices.
This all makes quite a bit of sense and would certainly explain alot of things surrounding this race.
For example, Hasman wins the election and the first thing he decides to do is manage this online information the right way. What he is more than likely going to find is what the GOP and county fear the most. Peoples lives, businesses and then some records completely screwed up and probably a great deal of dirt on rotten’ deals at the communities expense.
In closing my conversation with my neighbor he said, “It does not matter whether your a democrat, republican or none of the above when it comes to this stuff. People need vote for the person who is best equipped to not only solve what are apparently massive problems now before other people and businesses are injured but also make certain that in the future county online access to these forms of services is properly managed. Hasman is perfect for this position as he has the experience and credentials to fix things right. His employment with SRA international not only proves his skill levels but a community such as ours could not ask for a better friend of county government and security than SRA”.
[...] Finally, Dinolfo tags the wrong guy with a crime. [...]
[...] what is it going to take? btp talked about it over the weekend - here is a refresher. Via the original Rnews report, it’s more than Social Security [...]
My husband is the Retired RPD Investigator and Vietnam Veteran that was misfiled and labeled a Criminal by the Monroe County Clerk Office on JUNE 8th, 2008. He was assigned a Criminal Index Number and logged into the Criminal Book, and his “record” stated he was convicted, sentenced, and pled on July 15th, 2008.
We watched the interview R-News did with us and Cheryl Dinolfo blew this off like it wasn’t any big deal sitting at her desk like an arrogant primadonna. There was NO appology. She did not appear to be concerned AT ALL but looked “ticked off” that this was brought to the publics attention. Talk about a victim mentality.
She stated “We have a daily process. As our documents come in, we review those documents to ensure the integrity of those documents each and every day,” … REALLY LADY? If that were true, then why did my husband get misfiled on June 8th - almost 5 months ago? Obviously, someone didn’t have their glasses on that day as my husband was assigned the SAME INDEX NUMBER AS THE REAL CRIMINAL. Now how THE HECK did they assign TWO different people the same CRIMINAL INDEX NUMBER? Huh? DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUH!
I angrily emailed them on October 18th - last Saturday -. I received a telephone call from some woman at the Monroe County Clerk’s Office doing damage control for Ms. Dinolfo on Tuesday, October 21st - nervously telling me that they corrected this error and that everything is fine now. FINE NOW? Cheryl Dinolfo should have telephoned my husband personally and APPOLOGIZED and I am outraged that she didn’t. My husband protected our citizens and put his life on the line for 20 YEARS while working for the Rochester Police Department and thats the respect he gets? Or lack thereof I should say? He is also a Vietnam Veteran who protected our country!
We found this error by “accident”. Thank God. What if we hadn’t decided to check out the legitimacy of home contractors that day and decided to type our own names in for the heck of it?
We felt it was our civic duty to come forward and expose this gross incompetence. There are so many people who are out of work and desperately looking for a job to include single parents, Sr Citizens, young people. What if a potential employee was doing a background check and discovered that the applicant had a Criminal Record filed against them? They wouldn’t know it was an error but would have just passed on that person and not hired them. How about people who may have actually been FIRED because their employer got wind that they had a Criminal Record mis-filed against them at the Monroe County Clerks Office?
This is a REALLY serious MISTAKE that could have DISASTEROUS consequences for 1000s of Monroe County residents and businesses.
The system needs to be shut down immediately and checked for more misfilings such as in my husband’s case. You can almost be certain if there was one error there will be 1000’s. Its one thing to post over 15,000 Social Security numbers online but it is quite another to falsey ID a person as a CRIMINAL complete with a Criminal Index Number, Case details, and logged in the Criminal Book.
I recommend - NO- I DEMAND- that Monroe County Executive Maggie Brooks suspend Cheryl Dinolfo pending an investigation. After all, she’s the one who placed Ms. Dinolfo in that position in the first place. Cheryl Dinolfo is obviously out of her league as the Monroe County Clerk and does not deserve to hold that position she was elected for.