In 1997, Arizona’s Maricopa County (which includes Phoenix) became the first government entity in the nation to post public records online. The decision to post a blizzard of records, including land purchases, election information, tax information, divorce cases and much more, garnered praise from the local press and won Maricopa a place in the Smithsonian’s prestigious National IT Innovation Collection. But it has come back to bite the county in a most unpleasant way: Maricopa now claims the highest rate of identity theft in the nation, and local IT officials say the two statistics are inextricably linked.

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