Forget lost or stolen laptops - government websites are the real treasure troves for identity thieves, containing millions of searchable records brimming with Social Security numbers, dates of birth and all the ingredients criminals need to plunder bank accounts, ruin credit and wreck lives.

Recognizing the threat posed to citizens, the Florida Legislature passed a law four years ago requiring court clerks and county recorders to strike out personal information posted on the Web.

But the uncensored documents remain online, exposing hundreds of thousands of residents to identity theft, from schoolteachers and retirees to power brokers such as State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle and business mogul H. Wayne Huizenga.

The reason: Under pressure from the state's record keepers for more time, the Legislature has extended the deadline twice for completing the redaction, which was supposed to have been finished on Jan. 1. At the same time, the state set the same Jan. 1 deadline for photographic images of official records, including deeds, mortgages, liens, judgments and other public documents, to be available online.

The deadline to censor the online records is now Jan. 1, 2008.

A quick search of the Miami-Dade County Clerk's website, for instance, yielded the Social Security numbers of Miami Heat center Alonzo Mourning and Miami Herald publisher Jesús Díaz Jr., among other community notables. The same is true on Broward County's website, where Dolphins defensive end Jason Taylor's Social Security number is displayed.

''It's crazy that a person's personal information can just be out there on the Internet for anyone to view,'' Mourning said when he was told his Social Security number, written in his own hand, was on a 1996 mortgage viewable on the Miami-Dade clerk's website. ``I had no idea.''

(Individuals mentioned in this report were notified before publication so they could request a redaction from the Clerk of Courts.)

ACCESS VS. PRIVACY

The debate spotlights the clash between open access to public records and protecting personal privacy in the digital age, especially in Florida, home of some of the most liberal public records laws.

''The government down there is spoon-feeding criminals all over this world,'' said Betty Ostergren, a Virginia-based privacy advocate who has brought national attention to the security threat posed by online records. ''What they should have done was make the clerks and recorders close down the websites until they finished redaction.''

In Austin, Texas, public outcry recently forced the Travis County clerk to remove the records from county websites until they were redacted. For now, an index of the documents remains online.

Tom Julin, a Miami-based First Amendment lawyer, said the potential for harm is exaggerated. ``They shouldn't be taken offline because the value that they have for people is so great that it outweighs any potential harm that might come to someone by having the information available online,'' Julin said.

Indeed, some county clerks have questioned whether taking down the images at this point, or even redacting them, would make any difference.

''I don't know what that would accomplish since it's already in the public domain,'' Ruvin said.

RECORDS SOLD

Counties regularly sell the information to data brokers, direct-marketing, title-search and mortgage companies.

''If somebody bought those records from us, we can't do anything about it, and the Legislature hasn't done anything about it,'' said Karl Youngs, general counsel for the Manatee County Clerk of Circuit Court. ''It's kind of like a genie's-out-of-the- bottle type of deal.''

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