Spring cleaning yields private Oregon driver’s license information

Local computer guy gives disk to police; information
could have aided identity theft

A Molalla man accidentally stumbled upon what appears to be the driver’s license information of thousands of Oregonians.

Darryl Howe, owner of CompUSmart in Molalla, found a zip drive while doing some spring cleaning on Wednesday at his other job, McFarlane’s Bark Inc. in Milwaukie, where he works as a computer system administrator.

Howe frequently uses zip drives — computer memory sticks used for storing and transferring files — for both his jobs and was happy to add another to his collection.

“Nobody knew who it belonged to, so I thought, well, I can make use of it,” Howe said.

On Thursday, Howe opened the drive on a computer and found it contained a photo file with an image of someone’s driver’s license. Another folder on the drive held alphabetized text files.

“I open this text file and it’s clearly names and addresses of people all over the state of Oregon,” Howe said. “I tried to look myself up. Finally, I found a family member who was in there — my brother.”

Following the addresses of each name, a series of numbers and letters were listed that didn’t initially make sense.

Howe began to put the pieces together. The codes appeared to indicate a driver’s license number, date of birth, gender, height and weight for each person on the list.

Howe called his brother and confirmed that the information was, in fact, the same information on his driver’s license.

“These cryptic numbers started making sense,” Howe said. “I was looking at this thing and it struck me. This is something that would be from the DMV database … It belonged in the hands of the police.”

Howe brought the zip drive to the Molalla Police Department, where it was turned over to a Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office deputy.

“We’re very grateful for the conscientious citizen who brought this to our attention,” CCSO spokesperson Det. Jim Strovink said.

The 128-megabyte memory stick held thousands of Oregonians’ information, Howe said.

“I remembered hearing a story a few years ago about the DMV office being broken into,” Howe said. “My guess is that the person was probably using this information for identity theft, but that’s speculation,” Howe said.

Craig Daniels, manager of the records policy unit for Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles, said it is likely the files came from an old mailing list.

The DMV used to make mailing lists available for purchase.

“Sometimes (criminals) used these old lists to make fake IDs,” Daniels said. “The privacy law was amended in 2001 and no longer allowed mailing lists to be sold.”

The files on the memory stick did not appear recent, Strovink said.

It has been submitted to the CCSO computer forensics department for further investigation.

DMV will also investigate the files.