This is unnerving

There's an article on CNN's website this morning entitled, "More of your information than you think might be online". Did you know that government websites often display Social Security numbers? This is very worrying. Take a look:

(CNN) -- If you are worried about a thief stealing your identity, it's not your wallet that needs guarding -- it's your state and local governments.

That's the alarm Betty "BJ" Ostergren, the self-proclaimed Virginia Watchdog, has been sounding for the past four years from her rural Virginia home.

Sitting at her computer, she shows us with just a click of the mouse she can find Social Security numbers, birthdates, bank loans and even digitized signatures that a clever thief could easily manipulate onto official-looking documents. Everything anyone would need to steal your identity is right online, put there by local and state government agencies.
...
It happened, Ostergren said, in an effort by state and local governments to move toward a paperless society. That means records that once required a trip to a local courthouse or government office building to get can now be accessed from anywhere in the world simply by logging on and zeroing in.

The article concludes this way:

"We are very stupid in this country," Ostergren said. "Very stupid. This is just spoon-feeding criminals if there ever was such a thing."

No kidding. The damnable thing is that there doesn't seem to be a solution. Whatever is done now is like shutting the stable door after the horse gets out, according to one official.