Over the years, her campaign has succeeded in forcing state and county governments to revise images of public records that were posted online or to break online links to document images containing Social Security numbers. In August, Ostergren provided links to an image of a mortgage document containing the Social Security number of Iowa Secretary of State Mike Mauro. She removed the link only after Mauro agreed to take down images of corporate documents that contained Social Security numbers from the state's Web site.

Largely in response to her campaign, Virginia lawmakers that prohibits the dissemination of any records that contain Social Security numbers, no matter how the records were obtained. Violators are subject to fines of up to $2,500 plus $1,000 in court costs for each Social Security number posted. Lawmakers said the law was needed to prevent even wider dissemination of the numbers obtained from public records.

The law would have required Ostergren to remove Social Security numbers from her Web site or face punitive fines. The Virginia chapter of the American Civil Liberites Union challenging the constitutionality of the law.

Last August, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia for the commonwealth of Virginia to force Ostergren to remove the numbers from her site. While the court did not say the law itself was unconstitutional, it ruled that it would be an unconstitutional application of the law in Ostergren's case.

That ruling in turn was appealed to the Fourth Circuit court by Virginia's attorney general. In it, the government said that the case raised the issue of "crime facilitating speech." The Social Security numbers posted by Ostergren on her Web site exposed the individuals assigned those numbers to a serious risk of identity theft, the appeal claimed. First Amendment rights do not protect speech that exposes public officials to the "the very real prospect of devastating criminal predation," the appeal read.