A Washington State U.S. Senator is requesting the U.S. Department of Justice undertake a national study on the criminal connections between identity theft and illicit drug use. Police are reporting that in one county, 90 percent of the ID theft suspects had prior methamphetamine charges. Could the intractable problem of drug addiction and its destructive reverberation throughout the society pose as great (or greater) threat to financial information privacy than the Choicepoint data leak? Once again, an ID theft cause that can’t be legislated away through restricting database record aggregating. Read the article




identity theft

Increasingly it’s the case that people, especially “young people” (My neighbor’s description of me. And it wasn’t that long ago!), use only cell phones and not landline telephones. If you’re trying to reach a witness or just want to talk to someone away from home you might consider the statistics from a study by NOP World, from TracNotes.

New Study: 44% of U.S. Teens and Pre-Teens Have Wireless Phones - Almost half of the nation’s 10-to 18-year-olds own a mobile phone, according to a new study
released this week by NOP World Technology, a market research firm. Furthermore, ownership among 12-14 year olds increased from 13% in February 2002 to 40% in December 2004. The majority (73%) of 18 year olds own cell phones as well, a 15% increase from 2002, and three-quarters (75%) of 15-17 year olds also carry cell phones, up from 42% in 2002.

If you’re licensed as an attorney or investigator, or work for a government entity I can send you a list of vendors that provide these records.

telephone information

Various Illinois police departments forgot to tell school Principals the names of the juvenile sex offenders enrolled at their schools. Some law enforcement agencies refused to give notification even though state law allows them.

Some principals were not told that young sex offenders had enrolled in their schools, because the state system designed to notify them is mired in confusion, according to a Tribune investigation. While the list of Illinois’ adult sex offenders is accessible to anyone on the Internet, a similar registry of about 1,100 juveniles who have ommitted sex crimes is largely kept secret. Read the article [avoid subscription: privacy1st@mailinator.com/tribune]

One Chicago school Principal, turning over the various security responses the school might take, expressed a concern for the students’ privacy rights. He means the offender.

The closure of records and government regulation can’t blunt the most pervasive cause of identity theft: the sticky fingered housemate. According to a 2005 report by Javelin Strategy, working with the Better Business Bureau, in the cases where the method of the theft was known, a whopping 62 percent were from sources not online.

The recommendation? Get a shredder.

identity theft

Just who owns the garbage at the curb is an issue in flux. In a prior posting I highlighted the U.S. Supreme Court and some state court opinions on the matter, showing that a few states contravene (”have a higher standard”) the Federal cases. Add Indiana to that short list.

Indiana Law Blog reports on a recent (need I say, drug related) case, Patrick & Susan May Litchfield v. State of Indiana, in which the Indiana Supreme Court questioned whether the police had “articulable individualized grounds for suspicion that the Litchfields were involved in illegal activity” or were just tipped off by the DEA.

We hold that a search of trash recovered from the place where it is left for collection is permissible under the Indiana Constitution, but only if the investigating officials have an articulable basis justifying reasonable suspicion that the subjects of the search have engaged in violations of law that might reasonably lead to evidence in the trash. Read the decision

Apparently, if the police didn’t see them put the drugs there, the police can’t go snooping. Next, law enforcement may have to get a search warrant to go through the trash. This determination shouldn’t affect civilian dumpster diving. Many an impoverished soul has found this to be a tried and true method for getting great furniture. The case is remanded to the trial court. Stay tuned for further clarification. Read an article

[Thanks to Sanford Glickman, Glickman Investigations, for bringing this to my attention.]

Some recent state decisions arguing there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in trash collected:

District of Columbia: CATHERINE DANAI, APPELLANT, v. CANAL SQUARE ASSOCIATES, APPELLEE, December 2, 2004, Decided

Ms. Danai filed a claim for invasion of privacy against Canal, alleging that Canal removed a discarded letter from her trash and used it against her in the possession lawsuit. The trial court granted summary judgment in favor of Canal. We affirm the judgment of the trial court, and hold that Ms. Danai had no reasonable expectation of privacy in trash collected from her office and placed [*2] with other office trash in a locked community room under the control of property managers for ultimate disposal off-site.

Georgia: SCOTT v. THE STATE, November 1, 2004, Decided

Scott contends that the trial court erred in denying his motion to suppress. Specifically, he argues that the warrantless search and seizure of the garbage bags were illegal and a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights because the bags were in garbage cans which were not at curbside but instead within the curtilage of his house. We disagree.

fourth amendment

The Michigan Department of Corrections had a good idea when it placed a criminal convictions database on the Internet. Now they want to block access by the public because it has been used to conduct background checks. Now, what exactly is wrong with that?

Corrections trying to change access to offender database
March 26, 2005, 11:11 AM
DETROIT (AP) — Michigan Department of Corrections officials have postponed a plan to remove the names of 215,000 ex-offenders from their online database after some in law enforcement said the system was a useful crime-fighting tool.

Police personnel records many be available in Arizona under state law.

An Illinois state law prohibits activity that monitors its government. In preparation for his documentary film, which was broadcast on public television, Patrick Thompson was filming police as they made traffic stops. The police seized his film and the District Attorney charged the scofflaw with eavesdropping. It’s disturbing. The right of people to monitor, observe and collect documentation on the operation of their government should be written into every state constitution. How can we maintain a democracy if activity that doesn’t interfere with the police or other government operations is illegal?

Filmmakers’ documentation of police stops runs afoul of snooping law

For years, Illinois law has prohibited recording conversations unless everyone agrees. The state Legislature toughened the law 10 years ago, removing an exemption that allowed conversations to be recorded if they took place in public.

illinois open government

The legal periodicals index, LegalTrac, is free through some libraries. This extensive index is searchable by keyword or periodical and returns citations, and sometimes an abstract. I wrote about this tool in January and mentioned other valuable library sources.

A keyword search through LegalTrac on the phrase “private investigator” returned 27 citations, from 1984 to the present, from prominent publications, including California Lawyer, National Law Journal and Bench and Bar. Here’s one abstract.

The National Law Journal, March 10, 1997 v19 n28 pA1 col 2 (63 col in)
Use of private investigators by lawyers on the rise; but sleuths say many attorneys don’t know how to use them effectively. Loren Stein.
Abstract: The success of both civil and criminal litigation depends more on a partnership of lawyer and private investigator as litigation grows in complexity. Demand for investigators to perform services in addition to the ones they used to be responsible for has increased and according to one survey their use has increased 40% in the last 5 years. Advantages of using investigators include their decreasing the pretrial discovery process and their ability to testify as neutral witnesses to a jury.

A DNA sample of a suspect cleared him of any crime but the man was not told why he was considered a suspect. Society and individual liberties are better served by making government records and activity more transparent. If the suspect can know that he was cleared why can’t he know the reason he was considered in the first place? Perhaps the government intrusion that disrupted the suspect’s anonymity was necessary. Exposing the the whole process to the light of day better serves the interests of the public in being able to monitor their government, while, at the same time, more convincingly relieving this individual from suspicion and any possible aspersion to his character. A letter from the law enforcement agency would be nice… Read the story in Slashdot.