BCA says non-public criminal records were accessible for about 2 months

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Judge gavel, scales of justice and law books in court. (Brian A. Jackson/South Florida Sun Sentinel)

MINNEAPOLIS (FOX 9) - The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) announced it recently learned some sealed criminal records were mistakenly made accessible to the public, and the error that caused this has since been corrected.

What we know

The BCA said most of the records impacted are cannabis-related records that qualified for automatic expungement under the Adult Use Cannabis Act. Those records had been public before they were sealed in May 2024, according to state officials.

The BCA said the data breach included the following:

166 non-public records were viewed on the public criminal history website.
1,957 non-public records were accessible on the public criminal history website. 1,942 were accessible from May 13 to July 9. The remaining 15 records were accessible for "varied amounts of time" according to the BCA.
10 vendors received records in response to data requests for all public criminal history data.

Officials said this happened when a computer process "did not function as intended" and some records were erroneously made accessible on the public website.