The 2006 report, Future Trends in State Courts, issued by the National Center for State Courts, is a compilation of several dozen articles. One that may be of most interest to investigators and information researchers is, Court Record Access Policies: Under Pressure from State Security Breach Laws?

Courts are affected by national trends in privacy legislation. Over the past ten years, many courts have reevaluated and modified public access record policies to increase protections on personal information in court records, especially as court records are made available via the Internet. As private-sector data is more heavily regulated, and as state legislatures enact state security breach laws to protect consumer privacy and ward off identity theft, court record access policies may be under continued pressure to conform.

A Focus on Identity Theft, Social Security Numbers, and the
Courts, “examines the interest by federal policymakers to tackle the problem of identity theft by restricting the display of Social Security numbers in public documents.”