New from the Federal Judicial Center:

“A Memorandum to Honorable Reena Raggi, Chair, Privacy Protection Subcommittee [of the Judicial Conference Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure]  regarding Social Security Numbers in Federal Court Documents,” by George Cort and Joe Cecil (Federal Judicial Center), April 5, 2010.

The summary states:

“The Center identified 2,899 documents with one or more unredacted Social Security numbers among the almost ten million documents filed in federal district and bankruptcy courts in a recent two-month period. Seventeen percent of these documents appeared to qualify for an exemption from the redaction requirement under the relevant privacy rules. An unknown number of the remaining documents may qualify for a waiver of the privacy protection under the rules, but we could not determine whether such a waiver applied to the documents identified in this study.”