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Last year, Civil Beat shared the names and salaries of thousands of public sector employees. This year, the state government is working to make sure that such sharing never happens again.

A bill introduced Friday would make private names and other data currently part of the public record. That data is public under the state’s open records law — the .

“I’m not saying the public shouldn’t know … but public employees should not be subject to exposure any more than the private sector,” said Sen. Pohai Ryan, ‘s primary introducer. She cited potential identity theft and the right to privacy as her rationale for the proposal. “They should not be second-class citizens.”

But University of Hawaii media law professor Gerald Kato said there are sometimes good reasons for open records that trump workers’ right to privacy. Nepotism and corruption are harder to spot when names are private.

The bill threatens to “chip away at the edges” of the state’s public records law, he said.

The bill comes in response to a series of stories Civil Beat published last year that revealed the salaries of employees in the city and state governments. The bill’s preamble references “a local online news service” that made several requests for information, then published a database of employees’ salaries.

Public salaries are shared widely across the nation, as evident in a of national salary data. It’s considered a fundamental right for taxpayers to be able to know specifically how their money is spent.

Ryan and other senators said they understand the obligation to be transparent about the state’s finances.

“It’s important that the citizens know that these positions are getting paid this much. It allows comparisons, whether within the public sector or (against) the private sector,” said Sen. Will Espero, one of the co-sponsors. “In this case, I think the idea of removing names is OK. Let’s see what the public thinks. I don’t think the public would be concerned that we don’t identify a person with a title and a salary number.”

Another co-sponsor, Sen. Carol Fukunaga was surprised to learn that the proposal would nix names from the public record.

When told the bill makes private a slew of data — name, business address, business telephone number, job description, and education and training background, for example — Fukunaga admitted the bill “does propose to delete a lot of what is currently provided.”

(Civil Beat’s salary databases included only name, title and salary, not the other biographical information.)

Fukunaga said she was looking forward to receiving public testimony on the bill, which passed first reading Monday and was referred to the Committee on Judiciary and Labor. Sen. Clayton Hee, chair of that committee, did not respond by 5 p.m. to Civil Beat’s question about the future of the bill. He was not among the sponsors.

Fukunaga said the Uniform Information Practices Act was designed in the days before the Internet, and that “the drafters of the legislation never really envisioned that information would be so widely disseminated.”

“Maybe it’s a good time for us to examine how much information should be provided and what should be the appropriate balance,” she said.

Sen. Michelle Kidani said she heard from constituents in her district who were concerned about identity theft in light of Civil Beat’s articles. Sen. Mike Gabbard said in an e-mail that the identity theft issue was his “main reason” for signing on as a co-sponsor.

“I, and the other Senators, fully understand the requirement to disclose government salaries to the public,” Gabbard wrote. “However, we have been advised by the Honolulu Police Department that if a potential criminal knows the specific name, salary, and place of business of a person they might be more able to piece together their identity and steal that identity. For that reason, I support this legislation, as it protects individual employees, while still fulfilling our obligation to be transparent about State finances.”

The Honolulu Police Department is the one government agency in Hawaii that has refused to disclose salary data for its employees.

Espero, however, threw cold water on the idea that releasing public salary data could contribute to identity theft. He called the purported legislative rationale “wordsmithing” and said the bill’s authors “were looking at how can this bill get passed and tying it with identity theft is what they were looking at in this stage.”

Asked to point to a single instance of identity theft that occurred due to Civil Beat’s salary stories, Ryan said she could not. She said her bill is designed to avoid that scenario.

She acknowledged that identity theft was only half of the equation, saying she was motivated by a 50-50 split between that and the general right to privacy. She said some employees were “embarrassed by the exposure, because there was a disparity.”

“I do think that taxpayers should have the right to know a public employee’s title and the wage,” she said. “What is the need for knowing the name, when the position and the salary is more important?”

Kato, the UH journalism professor, said he understands the reaction from public employee unions and thinks there may be only gossip value to some disclosures. However, he said, “there are going to be situations that occur where there may very well be a good reason to know who a specific person attached to a specific job and how much they earn.”

“Who it is may be very relevant,” he said. “In government, we deal with specific people. We don’t deal with job categories. Bottom line is that the public should know who that person is. That’s part of transparency in government: We know who works in government.”

Kato, who teaches [pdf] and is himself a public employee whose name appears in Civil Beat’s UH salary database, pointed to instances of nepotism or misdeeds that require the public know who specifically is involved.

He said the public’s right to know should continue to trump workers’ right to privacy.

“We tend to enact laws in the guise of privacy or whatever that will seal off wholesale information that the public is entitled to and have access to,” he said. “That’s my fear to these kinds of amendments to the information practices law — that we chip away at the edges and try to dilute all the brave words that we declared when we set up the information practices law.”

Phone messages left for and e-mails sent Monday afternoon to the 10 other sponsors — Suzanne Chun Oakland, Donovan Dela Cruz, Kalani English, Brickwood Galuteria, David Ige, Donna Mercado Kim, Clarence Nishihara, Maile Shimabukuro, Malama Solomon and Jill Tokuda — were not returned by 5 p.m.