Trooper Joseph Smigel patrols Connecticut state roads every day. If he catches you speeding by, he'll pull out his ticket pad.

Tens of thousands of state drivers who get a traffic ticket like the ones Trooper Smigel hands out choose to pay their violations online through the states E-pay program. But the Troubleshooters uncovered a flaw in the system. E-pay was introduced two years ago and since then we found over a thousand drivers who should have had their licenses suspended either did not, or were not required to take driver retraining classes to legally be on the road.

"31,126 cases were not reported to the DMV,” said Stacey Manware, deputy director of Superior Court Operations for Connecticut’s court system.

Because of a computer glitch, the state Judicial Branch wasn't telling the Department of Motor Vehicles when someone was convicted of a moving violation -- if they paid for it online. So that conviction never went on the driver's history.

"Were drivers in Connecticut in danger because of this computer glitch?" asked our Troubleshooter.

"There were people on the road that may have been suspended,” answered Manware.

The state caught the problem last November after drivers who were expecting sanctions on their licenses started asking questions themselves. In January, the DMV mailed over 30,000 copies of three different letters to inform drivers that those old tickets were now catching up with them.

It was not a big deal for most of the drivers. But 319 people got a letter informing them their license was finally being suspended -- two years late. And over 1,000 people got a letter telling them they have to take driver retraining classes or else face “suspension of your license.”

"For two years we were not reporting cases to DMV,” said Manware.

"And that's a violation of state statue?" asked our reporter.

"That's correct,” answered Manware.

Turns out in this case the very branch of state government that's supposed to uphold the law was actually violating state statute, since it is required to report these convictions to the DMV.

“We wouldn't know unless they told us,” said DMV spokesman Bill Seymour.

Seymour said that as soon as the agency learned of the problem, it took action by updating driver histories and informing the public. But the problem goes beyond the DMV.

“Law enforcement checks our records,” said Seymour.

That meant officers like Trooper Smigel who may have stopped one of these drivers in the last two years didn't have some of the information they rely on.

"It's a system of checks and balances that we have in place with our agencies,” explained Lt. Paul Vance of the State Police.

Judicial said it's fixed the problem, and the DMV said it has imposed the proper sanctions on any drivers who skated through on that computer glitch. Still, the question remains —how, for two years, no one noticed the E-pay system never worked the way it was intended -- allowing unsafe drivers to stay on the road right next to you and your family.

“It was just something that happened,” said Manware.

She said from now on, Judicial will check and recheck any new systems they introduce.

Meantime, officials told us all of the unnoticed convictions were for moving violations like speeding and failure to stop at a stop sign.  Criminal matters like DUIs were not affected.

The shootings of 20 young children and six adult workers last month at a Connecticut elementary school has revived debate not only over gun control, but also over whether the holders of handgun permits should be identified publicly.

The fiercely contested question of confidentiality for handgun permit holders arose last month after the shooting in New York's Lower Hudson Valley published the names of local gun owners. The newspaper, the Journal News, based in Nyack, N.Y., reportedly had to hire armed guards because of the outpouring of anger that greeted publication of its map.

The newspaper acted after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown on Dec. 14, which also claimed the lives of the gunman, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, and his mother, spurring new activism for gun control. It was able to get the information through the state's freedom of information, or FOI, laws.

The same information isn't available in Connecticut, because that data is exempt from state FOI law. But after the Newtown massacre, Democratic state Rep. Stephen Dargan introduced a bill to change that. His measure, which has yet to receive its first hearing, would make the names and addresses of about 170,000 handgun permit holders in the state available to the general public, NBC 30 of Hartford reported.

NBCConnecticut: Lawmaker proposes publicizing gun owners' names

"Most things are FOI-able now," Dargan told the Hartford Courant this week. "I don't know why a responsible gun owner is worried about whether a permit for a revolver is FOI-able or not."

If you're wondering whether you can get hold of such information in your state, chances are you can't.

Under a federal law, the FBI conducts an instant background check on prospective gun buyers for federally licensed dealers to make sure the buyers don't have criminal records or are otherwise ineligible. But how the states handle that information once a sale has been approved is all over the map. 

Most states collect the background information from dealers and require a separate state permit to own the weapon. But most of them don't make the information publicly available. 

A survey of the gun registration and permitting in all 50 states by NBC News indicates that 39 of them shield background information, permits and registrations from public inspection, with exceptions for law enforcement and other official agencies. Nine others make the data public or have no laws addressing confidentiality.

In Florida and Illinois, concealed-weapons debate lays bare the politics of gun control

The issue is moot in Vermont, which doesn't require a permit to carry a weapon, and in Nevada, where the picture is unclear.

Nevada state law declares that the identities of applicants for permits are confidential, but in 2010, the state Supreme Court struck down part of the law, ruling that the identity of permit holder should be an open public record once the permit has been issued.

Here's a state-by-state breakdown:

CONFIDENTIAL
Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas (.pdf), Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii (.pdf), Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky (.pdf), Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey (.pdf), New Mexico (.pdf), North Dakota (.pdf), Ohio (limited exceptions for journalists), Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming

GENERALLY OPEN OR NO LAW
California, Iowa, Mississippi (45 days after issuance of permit), Montana, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, West Virginia

After a bloody 2012, some in Congress are seeking to centralize records on gun owners nationwide — Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., for example, has proposed legislation that would create a national gun registry, collecting IDs, photos and fingerprints of owners of most legal weapons.

Her proposal says nothing about making the registry public.

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