GovNews Blog | Extract Systems

County officials that handle land and court records are, among many other things, responsible for three things:

The Russians are coming!  The Russians are coming!

Sorry, I am not writing a review of  the 1966 comedy starring Carl Reiner, Eva Marie Saint and Alan Arkin.  Nope, not nearly as funny…

The Russians, Chinese, Iranians, eastern Europeans—and probably the US government too—are all coming to a database near you.  They are systematically gathering data about all of us.  No bit of data is too small because it could be the key piece private information that connects all the disparate and seemingly unimportant information they’ve already collected on you.  Imagine creating a digital picture of you, one pixel at a time.  Get it?  No wait, they’ve got it.

As we embark on a new year, I would like to thank Extract’s customers and colleagues for your support and engagement this year. It’s been a significant year for our company which I’ll boil down by sharing two exciting milestones:

• Customers have protected the private information within more than 2.5 billion pages by redacting documents with ID Shield Redaction Software
• More than 400 customers have deployed our public sector solutions: FLEX Index and ID Shield

I’m inspired by our customers’ passion and vision for increasing efficiency, securing sensitive information and improving customer experience with existing resources. Nearly every day I notice how our accomplishments are tied to our customers’ drive for innovation. I’m grateful for their willingness to share their stories and define their challenges.

Judge Damon Keith said, “Democracy dies in darkness”. He was talking about the Watergate tapes but what he said is just as relevant about today’s Freedom of Information requests. Open meetings and open records are critical to our democracy. In Wisconsin, there is a push to allow government to charge a fee to redact the documents prior to distribution. This will stop some people from asking for public information – a harmful consequence for our proud tradition of transparent government.

Welcome to Extract’s new blog. Today in the mail, my wife and I got new replacement credit cards. We didn’t order them. We got them because there was a “possible” security failure and the credit card company isn’t sure who may have seen our credit card number. There was no phishing. Our numbers weren’t skimmed. Our wallets weren’t stolen. It was the credit card company’s security problem.