[ScottBurson]

> I was told by the county IT administrator "Did you ever stop to think if maybe this information was public for a reason?"

Absolutely jaw-dropping.

People's reactions to this kind of thing just blow my mind. If you are about to walk away from your car, having parked it in a high-crime area, and a passerby points out to you that you haven't locked it, do you call the police and have them arrested for looking into your car? If they were going to steal your car, would they have told you about it???

My wife ran into this back in 2001 or so. She had visited some Web site and noticed that the URLs followed a familiar pattern -- I think related to the Microsoft Access database. She wondered if some internal files were accessible via paths analogous to those she'd seen on the intranet where she worked. Sure enough, they were. She told the company about it, and of course they yelled at her.

Unfathomable.