MINNEAPOLIS—A Department of Natural Resources middle manager illegally accessed driver’s license data belonging to thousands of Minnesota women and kept encrypted pictures of 172 of them on a work computer before he was fired, prosecutors alleged in charges filed Thursday.
John Austin Hunt, 48, of Woodbury was charged with six counts, including misconduct by a public employee, unauthorized computer access, using encryption to conceal a crime and unlawful use of public data. The charges are misdemeanors and gross misdemeanors. The most serious counts carry a potential sentence of up to a year in jail and a $3,000 fine.
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Hunt was the DNR Enforcement Division’s administrative manager, with the rank of captain, and had legal access to the records for official business only. He would have seen a warning to that effect each of the 19,276 times he queried the state Driver and Vehicle Services database from 2008 through last October, the complaint said. The database includes names, addresses, photographs, heights, weights, hair and eye color, and other information on each driver licensed in the state. Many subjects were queried more than once.
He averaged about 4,000 queries per year, but his supervisor told investigators his job duties would not have required him to make more than 400 annually, primarily for conducting background checks on people seeking jobs with the DNR. Most of his queries were into the driver’s license database, but 426 were for license plate data.
The complaint further alleges 11,747 of those queries were made while Hunt was off duty, and 7,085 were made while he was on duty.
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