This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, November 16th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When journalists in Missouri discovered a state website hosting pages that contained

social security numbers of thousands of

teachers. They told the state and published their discovery for their trouble

they were threatened with lawsuits. Now months later Mike Masnick of Tech Dirt believes the state hasn't really learned its lesson.

Some journalists in Missouri made a discovery and published the fact that they made this discovery and the state, well first of all describe what

this discovery was and describe how the state rewarded them.

So they found that on the state's website or the department of I forget it has a

long name but the department of Education for elementary schools basically

within the state of Missouri had a website and if you knew where to look

within the source code you could find the Social security numbers of basically every teacher who has ever worked in Missouri

and school administrators as well.

All right, that's a huge problem, right?

This is widely considered to be private information.

And so how did the state respond?

Well, I mean, first of all, just to go back one further step,

which is that there were two separate audits

that were done years earlier, I think going back to 2015,

that warned this particular department that they should

not be collecting this information from teachers and storing it.

It wasn't they weren't talking about the website but they had been warned not to collect all of this information in the first place

...