Have you ever had a clerk at a public agency tell you that they could read you the information on their computer screen but they couldn’t print it? I don’t mean that the agency didn’t have the capability of printing it but just decided that they couldn’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t. Let your fingers do the walking over to The Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press, Tapping Officials’ Secrets, an online guide to using the open records laws in every state. This is a database of their interpretations of the laws backed up by case law and statutes.

Among the search results for “california public record” was this item:

“The fact that public records may be stored in a computer does not affect their status as public records. Cal. Gov’t Code § 6254.9(d). ”

This database helps you read and apply the law. Exercise your rights. You just might save a few of them.

The Iowa Department of Public Safety has kept public crime reports out of the hands of citizen researchers by commingling them with the confidential investigative conclusions. But, under pressure from journalists, the Public Safety Department suggested that, for a donation to the state coffers, this public information might be reformatted and then generally available.

“The head of the Iowa Department of Public Safety
says his agency is prepared to consider whether it can make crime
records more readily available to the public if The Des Moines
Register makes a financial donation to his agency.” Read the complete story

I’m all for private financing, considering the condition of state budgets and the intransigence of law enforcement agencies. It’s not a matter of political influence or massaging the data. These reports already exist. We just want to get our hands on them. I say, “Donate Here!”

From the hallowed Supreme Court of Michigan, via the Detroit Free Press:

A private investigator’s surveillance for an insurance company does
not constitute harassment under the state’s anti-stalking law, the Michigan
Supreme Court ruled Tuesday. Read the full story

The Court of Appeals’ ruling included this analysis of the state stalking statute:

The civil stalking statute, MCL 600.2954, creates a civil cause of action for victims of stalking as defined by the criminal stalking statute, MCL 750.411h, regardless whether the alleged stalker is charged or convicted under the equivalent criminal stalking statute. According to MCL 750.411h(1)(d), “stalking” is the “wilful course of conduct involving repeated or continuing harassment of another individual that would cause a reasonable person to feel terrorized, frightened, intimidated, threatened, harassed, or molested and that actually causes the victim to feel terrorized, frightened, intimidated, threatened, harassed, or molested.” The term “harassment” as used in subsection 411h(1)(d) is defined as:
. . . conduct directed toward a victim that includes, but is not limited to, repeated or continued unconsented contact that would cause a reasonable individual to suffer emotional distress and that actually causes the victim to suffer emotional distress. Harassment does not include constitutionally protected activity or conduct that serves a legitimate purpose. [MCL 750.411h(1)(c).] {Emphasis is mine.}

You have to wonder what planet the Court of Appeals was on when it determined that the surveillance was NOT serving a legitimate purpose. Here’s some more of the Appeals Court’s insightful conclusions:

After the first surveillance was thwarted when plaintiff made it clear that he did not consent to being followed by Conley, Conley nonetheless continued to appear within plaintiff’s sight until the police arrived. Once plaintiff detected Conley and Stovall in the second and fourth surveillances, a question of fact arose with respect to whether their continued appearance in his sight were unconsented contacts for purposes of the civil stalking claim. {Emphasis is mine.}

This made me laugh. How do these judges think we accomplish legitimate investigative goals when the subject is an adversary of our client? Walk up to him and say, “excuse me, I would like your consent to gather evidence that may undermine your claim”?

Thankfully the Michigan Supreme Court displayed better reasoning powers.

We conclude that surveillance by licensed private investigators that contributes to the goal of obtaining information, as permitted by the Private Detective License Act, MCL 338.822(b)(i)-(v), is conduct that serves a legitimate purpose.

Now, that was easy! Private investigators are being challenged in courts and legislatures in our pursuit of information through gathering documents and in observing human activity. This is where the demand for privacy rights has gotten out of hand. Private investigators are not observing for idle curiosity. We perform information gathering in legal cases for the purpose of establishing the legitimacy of a claim, not to intrude or make contact that creates emotional distress. But that hasn’t stopped the litigious!

The Center for Public Integrity makes the links between legislators, companies and industries in this searchable database of outside interests, as reported in 2002. Our Private Legislatures Search Database draws data from the financial disclosure forms filed by state lawmakers. The data includes “outside jobs, investments, directorships and closely held business interests in all 50 states.” Read their methodology. New data is being added as the financial disclosure forms are submitted to each state. See the schedule for your state.

The San Francisco Ethics Commission’s Financial Disclosure Database allows you to search financial influence of local candidates and ballot measures by committee name, candidate, contributor and employer. This is a bias identification tool that can supplement your background reports on witnesses and experts.

Do you know of other jurisdictions that have this type of search tool? Add it to the comments link at the bottom of this post.

Perhaps we Americans have a distorted expectation for privacy in the car. But if it’s going to be challenged, we want a human, not a dog to do it. A 6-2 decision by the Supreme Court of this great land has just ruled that a dog can determine if there is probable cause for law enforcement to search your car. This presents another good reason to drive the speed limit. Man drives a little over the posted speed threshold, gets stopped by cop. There are no drugs in sight, which would provide the police probable cause to search. But a drug-sniffing dog gives the signal that there is something suspicious in the trunk. Even the Illinois case cited a study that these dogs return 60 percent false positives.

Justice Stevens presented the opinion of the Court: “In our view, conducting a dog sniff would not change the character of a traffic stop that is lawful at its inception and otherwise executed in a reasonable manner, unless the dog sniff itself infringed respondent’s constitutionally protected interest in privacy. Our cases hold that it did not.” Yeah, like protection from intimidation or racial profiling. I imagine that events proceeding from this law will yield more fear of a “police state” than actual evidence.

Justice Stevens was, clearly, speaking of someone, not himself, when he argued that the “governmental conduct” of sniffing and, possibly, mistakenly prying into your vehicle does not intrude on a privacy interest.

We have held that any interest in possessing contraband cannot be deemed legitimate, and thus, governmental conduct that only reveals the possession of contraband compromises no legitimate privacy interest.

You mean, if no drugs are found my privacy isn’t violated? A glance into the car by an officer making a legitimate stop is a very different level of intrusiveness than the “advanced” technology applied by using a dog. Consider the distinction between taking notes during a phone interview without the other parties’ “permission” and tape-recording the conversation under the same conditions.

What is the significance of the use of drug-sniffing dogs at otherwise routine traffic stops?

Much hot back and forth has appeared around the ‘Net, at Tales of a Wandering Mind, Drug WarRant and pretty much the only different take was expressed at Open Society Paradox.

The search engine at business.com associates corporate and professional websites with a personal name search term, returning links to those sites and news articles in which the names are mentioned. Like any search device that narrows the field, it misses a lot. Don’t limit your field to any one site but this offers a decent first swipe.

Here’s a curious finding from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which I referred to in an earlier posting, that got me thinking about a serious problem. The Pew study findings reveal that a small percentage of Internet “researchers” can tell the difference between returns on their search terms and the resulting advertisements. Slashdot noted this finding, citing a small story on it at the ABC News site.

The Pew Report makes this wry observation about fuzzy human logic:

Only 38% of users are aware of the distinction between paid or sponsored results and unpaid results. And only one in six say they can always tell which results are paid or sponsored and which are not. This finding is ironic, since nearly half of all users say they would stop using search engines if they thought engines were not being clear about how they presented paid results.

This disconnect between what people observe and what they think they observe got me reflecting on the widely noted fallibility of eyewitness testimony. One of the significant findings Elizabeth Loftus made was the weak correlation of confidence to accuracy. Even as event details deteriorate the witness maintains a high degree of confidence in the accuracy of their recall. James Doyle, Loftus’ co-author of Eyewitness Testimony: Civil and Criminal writes here about the intersection of the psychological and legal work. A detailed, hands-on guide to working with this quandary in criminal defense matters is developed in a recent article by Lisa Steele, Trying Identification Cases.

Far from the politico’s pulpit in D.C. emerges a deadly detailed blueprint of the near future debate that we will face in the State legislatures and Congress on sealing court records. A Minnesota Supreme Court advisory group recently issued report on public access to court records reveals the challenges that lay ahead for investigators. Read the pdf document

Wired News examines the Minnesota situation and the redacting of information from Florida Court records.

The National Center for State Courts links to the individual States’ pages for searching court records and their policies on public access. Then navigate to the Federal links to see case law and policy papers on electronic access, privacy and sealing court records.

And, want to engage in more blogging discussion on privacy and open government? Add to my posting at Dennis Bailey’s site, The Open Society Paradox (which is also his book title), where he comments on issues and technology related to privacy and open access.

New laws passed by 26 state legislatures in the 2004 session that impact law enforcement and criminal justice are summarized in this (pdf) 2004 State Report, issued by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. The Oregon Board of Investigators is proposing changes to their state licensing provisions. One of which states that licensed investigators “May not use unlicensed persons to conduct investigative activities.” I’d like to receive an interpretation of this proposal. Does this mean that employees must be licensed? Search bills by keyword for individual state legislatures.

There are varieties of search engines, all culling content by different means. Which gets to my prior post on the limitations of only running your search through Google.

The word, many words have circulated about the new Microsoft MSN search engine, which has a clean look copied from THE most popular search engine but ranks content very differently. It also offers a desktop toolbar, the new area of total computer content searching –retrieving files saved to your hard drive along with those on the Internet. The ins-and-outs of this newly designed search engine has been written about here
and more discussion over here.