safety and transparency, CA releases firearm online DB

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Bruenor
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safety and transparency, CA releases firearm online DB

Post by Bruenor »

here we go again..

Attorney General Bonta Releases New Firearms Data to Increase Transparency and Information Sharing
DOJ seeks to balance its duties to provide gun violence and firearms data to support research efforts while protecting the personal identifying information in the data the Department collects and maintains. Data-driven research plays a critical role in keeping Californians safe by informing and shaping our commonsense gun laws. With today’s announcement, Attorney General Bonta is improving accessibility and functionality of the existing firearms database with expanded information in a comprehensive data dashboard. The dashboard includes data from the past decade when available on the following subjects:

Dealer Record of Sales
Gun Violence Restraining Orders
Carry Concealed Weapons Permits
Firearms Safety Certificates
Assault Weapons
Roster of Certified Handguns
Except, per the Following poster, they did a {inappropriate language} job of scrubbing the PII data and it can all be cross referenced with the firearm data.
bad news post. https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/ ... arency-and" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

CA released a tool in the interest of "transparency" where gun data can be found. On the surface this is fine and doesn't appear to have anything personally identifiable.

Through a process that we will be not discussing, but is relatively easy and not even slightly hidden to do, you can access the names, addresses, and DOB's of all CCW holders in the state of CA. That includes judges, reserve officers, and random people like you and me. They also released information on FSC stats which has DOB and ID/DL numbers, and a file that includes DROS information, which has DOB, race, gender, and which dealer a given gun was purchased at since at least 2012. As you can see, this is devastating to the privacy of gun owners. It's fairly trivial to begin cross referencing data between these three documents to determine who owns what guns with decent accuracy, especially if they have a CCW that already says where they live.

To the best of my understanding, this is in violation of CA's own privacy laws. If not for us peasants, then definitely for the judges and reserve officers who are explicitly exempt from FOIA requests on this kind of data. I recommend contacting CRPA and the FPC ASAP with your concerns. Below is a form letter that you can use in your email if you'd like, as well as links to their contact information.
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kcclark
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Re: safety and transparency, CA releases firearm online DB

Post by kcclark »

There should be some automatic prison time of at least five years for providing thieves with address lists from government files.
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