Search real property profiles and current and historical building permits by parcel number or address for unincorporated Sonoma County, California.

Virginia has expanded its listings of incarcerations at the VineLink site, with plans to add all local jails. This is a good source for verifying the location of an inmate, but the site also lists former inmates who are deceased.

This Headquarters India.com article states that the Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil recently said that there was need for synergy between public and private security and announced that there will be a new law on private detective agencies.

“The law is to encourage them. The idea is to have as many private security agencies as possible. But, the only thing is that they should be reliable,” he said and assured them that “there shall be no difficulty”.

This article in the Gainesville Sun Newspaper of Gainesville, Florida details specific Florida laws that may impact private investigators in 5 categories:
• Mobile Tracking
• Telecommunications Crime
• Video Voyeurism
• Computer Crimes
• Theft of Cable

San Francisco real property sales from the Multiple Listing Service are searchable by address, address range, neighborhood, property profile, real estate agent or agency. Property profiles show a street view and interior photographs. Select the agent link to view all properties for that agent on the MLS.

Trulia.com is more geographically far reaching, covering cities and towns nationwide but it isn’t as comprehensive as the MLS. Use the “advanced search” tool to restrict the search by address or to include multiple towns (there’s no county option).

Check for regional sites, such as Redfin, which covers the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle, Washington, for more extensive listings and property options. Redfin MLS properties can be searched by address or neighborhood. Properties are plotted on a map, so you can view other nearby sales. The site also covers past property sales.

The article, How Pretexting Helped Serve Divorce Papers on a Runaway Mother, recounts the all too common experience of a process server attempting to get legal papers to a party to a lawsuit, demonstrating why an outright ban on pretexting is bad policy.

Despite the recent media hype surrounding the investigative practice of ‘pretexting’, the fact is that it is a valid and legal technique to locate, catch, and serve legal process onmany people who break the law in avoiding their legal responsibilities.

Other, more generally useful articles, such as, What To Do If You Get Pulled Over By A Cop, can be found in the “Legal” section of Associated Content.

A new player in the very active online real estate listings competition is PropertyShark, which, unlike Zillow, provides the current owner at an address, and also customizes demographic maps for the geographical region of an address.

At the Zillow site you can look for real property valuations and aerial photographs by property address. It covers many more cities than does PropertyShark but the tools at this site are a unique supplement to the other property listing and mapping Web sites.

A PropertyShark search by address (after free registration) returned a profile with the current ownership, last deed transfer, demographic maps, building permits, neighbors and nearby property sales. Coverage is strongest in New York, particularly Manhattan, for which there are photographs of properties, but take a look at all the site features. Cities in New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Florida, Texas, Washington, Oregon and California are currently included.

Map your life in Los Angeles and plot crime and property sales within the circumference of a specific address.

The brochure Genealogical Resources in U.S. Federal Depository Libraries has hyperlinks to Federal government resources on the Internet related to U.S. Census, military, immigration, land and vital records, and government agency history. Among the documents are archived telephone directories, some searchable, which are helpful for verifying when and where a person worked for a federal agency.

Review the other genealogical topics I’ve covered in past postings.

The Ventura County Sheriff detention database can be accessed online and searched by a partial name. Select the inmate’s booking number from the search result list to link to further details about the arrest, bail, jail housing, upcoming court dates and case information. Click on the link, “Superior Court Case Inquiry” to get the court docket, which is otherwise only available directly from the court Web site if you have the defendant’s full name and date of birth. All of this is revealed at the Sheriff’s Inmate Search.

The Texas Secretary of State has added 5 new searchable databases: Health Spas, Debt Collector Bonds, Law Enforcement Organizations (by solicitor, bonding company or public safety entity), Telephone Solicitors, and Veterans Organizations and Solicitors.

More details are emerging on the theme of secret court dockets, which have been reported on in various jurisdictions in the past year. A recent Miami Herald article reveals that false court records have been created to disguise the identity of government informants, in violation of state law.

Miami-Dade prosecutors argue that court rules that exempt some sensitive records from public disclosure also authorize judges to misrepresent the public record to protect informants. But no rule explicitly gives judges power to order the creation of a false court record.

The Federal Trade Commission recently posted its decisions back to 1969 but just enabled a full text search of the FTC repository. Select “FTC Decisions” above the search bar.

The California 2nd District Court of Appeal has upheld a lower court which ruled that consumers could not restrict the release of the portion of their credit reports that were drawn from public records. Information on tax liens, bankruptcies, court judgments and unlawful detainer actions are included with the financial activity statement issued by the credit bureaus. The decision renders unconstitutional California Civil Code section 1785.11.2 in regard to information that is truthful and which is culled from public records.

Reported by the California First Amendment Coalition, the case is U.D. Registry, Inc. v. State of California, Nos. B179653, B186012 (Oct. 3, 2006).