Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott issued an opinion that county clerks are required to remove social security numbers from documents before releasing them to the public. The outcry from county clerks, subsequently from legislators, has forced him to put a 60 day hold on enforcement while the legislators review the consequences of this sweeping directive.

Administrative rules adopted by the Arkansas Supreme court affirm public access to court records while shielding Social Security numbers. The Arkansas courts were also directed to make dockets, judgments, orders, or decrees accessible to the public online. Reported by The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

The Plumas County California GIS Parcel Viewer application is online. Construct a topographical map of terrain features, locate real property by APN or street address and label and measure distances between features.

Minnesota state Sen. Julianne Ortman, has sponsored legislation that “would explicitly allow under statute the sealing of most conviction, arrest and other criminal justice documents held by the courts and state and local government agencies” according to the Star Tribune. Some serious felonies would be excluded. SF 294 would require employers tell prospective employees that expunged records do not have to be identified.

The California Supreme Court has ruled that a county trial court must determine whether a psychologist used subterfuge to obtain an interview with the foster mother of a woman who had claimed as an adult a repressed memory of childhood sexual abuse.

Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, a renowned expert on the fallibility of eye witness evidence and an opponent of the notion of repressed memory, was a defendant in a civil court case that originated in Solano County California. Loftus reviewed a court case file and interviewed the foster mother in preparation for an article she was writing. The foster mother claimed that Loftus posed as a supervisor of the mental health professional in whom the plaintiff had confided. The alleged misrepresentation of the doctor-patient role is apparently the aspect of the invasion-of-privacy claim that concerned the Supreme Court.

At the same time, we also conclude that the Court of Appeal correctly determined that plaintiff’s action for improper intrusion into private matters could proceed based upon the claim that Loftus obtained personal and sensitive information regarding plaintiff from her former foster mother by misrepresenting herself as an associate of Corwin, a psychiatrist with whom plaintiff had a close professional relationship.

Although the opinion asserted that a misrepresentation of the patient-physician relationship is “different from the more familiar practice of a news reporter or investigator in shading or withholding information” this issue is being remanded to the trial court to decide.

The Los Angeles Times report quotes the representative for the news media who reflected on the court’s reasoning saying, ‘ “The problem is you don’t know with any predictive certainty” which sorts of misrepresentations would create liability.’

Also read:
Interview Methods Face Trial
California high court allows suit claiming misrepresentation to proceed, ABA Journal

Who Abused Jane Doe?
The Hazards of the Single Case History
Elizabeth F. Loftus and Melvin J. Guyer
Case histories make contributions to science and practice, but they can also be highly misleading.

What’s your opinion of the relevance of this case to private investigators?

A faithful reader clued me into the usefulness of restaurant inspection reports for finding names of employees at a business. Search the Sacramento County, California Food Facility Restaurant Inspection Reports database by partial street name or facility name. The reports often identify the owners and employees who signed the inspection report.

You may have to do some hunting around to get to the food inspection databases for these California counties. This cached site has more direct links to restaurant inspection reports and closures. Go to the web sites for a state Department of Public Health to find the county environmental health division.

Some states, like Virginia, are kind, and have direct links to each county database of inspections. There doesn’t seem to be a site that keeps a comprehensive collection of these links. Even the State of Washington Office of Environmental Health and Safety lists only 6 counties.

Add your local or state site to this posting’s comments.

Let’s get right to it. Congress is attempting to take away the tools of our trade. Private investigators want to stop the fraudsters but it’s counter productive to restrict private investigators, judgment collectors and process servers from accessing social security numbers to locate people and verify identities.

Congress has reintroduced legislation that private investigators fought last year but has come back in the form of The Social Security Number Protection Act of 2007, HR 948, which would prevent obtaining or providing “directly or indirectly, anything of value in exchange for a social security number” and the similar, Senate bill S. 238. As currently worded, there is no exception for private investigators.

So, if you pay for a database service that matches your subject’s name with a social security number you’ve just violated this proposed law. How are we to locate witnesses for court, reunite separated families and perform background searches? Don’t let this bill become law. Join NCISS and associations actively opposing it. Meet with the folks who represent you in Congress. Let them know private investigators aren’t “buying” social security numbers but we use SSNs for valid legal and business purposes.

As currently worded, Preventing Harassment through Outbound Number Enforcement (PHONE) Act of 2007, commonly known as caller-id spoofing, restricts the transmission of one person’s phone number to a third party in an attempt to disguise the caller’s identity. I guess as long as the caller doesn’t “spoof” the recipient with an actual person’s telephone number then they would be within the bounds of this law. It’s still a badly constructed piece of legislation. And, as with every other wave of the wand from Congress, add the law enforcement exception. Are you scared yet?

The Federal Trade Commission has sought a permanent injunction against Action Research Group and Eye In the Sky Investigations for obtaining and selling to third parties confidential customer phone records in violation of the FTC Act prohibiting deceptive acts.
Federal Trade Commission, Plaintiff, v. Action Research Group, Inc., Joseph Depante, Matthew Depante, Bryan Wagner, Cassandra Selvage, and Eye in the Sky Investigations, Inc., Defendants. (United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida Orlando Division)

Meanwhile, the Federal Communications Commission is getting resistance from telephone companies over proposed rules requiring that customers use a password to access their account information and that the companies get a customer’s permission before they release information for telemarketing.

The Justice Department is objecting to two of the FCC proposals.

The first would tell phone companies to destroy customer records as soon as the records no longer are needed for legitimate business purposes. The government wants the records preserved for possible use in criminal investigations.

Secondly, the two departments want phone companies to notify law enforcement officials first, before customers, when customers’ private billing information has been disclosed improperly.

The Florida Sexual Offenders and Predators database is now available en Español.

The public’s right to access public records supersedes laws relieving government agencies from compiling new records, according to a recent North Dakota Attorney General Opinion. The Department of Transportation denied a request for records by Carfax, although the state public records access law requires that “an electronically stored record under this section [44-04-18], or a copy thereof, must be provided at the requester’s option in either a printed document or through any other available medium.” ND DOT responded that it wasn’t required to create or compile a record that does not exist. The Attorney General disagreed, requiring corrective measures be instituted within 7 days.

The Texas Department of State Health Services has downloadable files of marriage license application and divorce indexes, organized by year. These are records that are available through other sources, usually for a fee, but if you want to work directly with the data yourself, this is the source. The marriage index covers 1966 through 2005; divorces include records filed from 1968 through 2005 . The marriage files have 140,000 to 166,000 records; each divorce file has between 50,000 to 87,000 records. The files are compressed and require a zip extractor but can also be purchased on CD, which may be a better option if you don’t want to store them on your hard drive.

The Names Project, which maintains the AIDS Memorial Quilt, has an online searchable database of the names appearing on the quilt panels. View the quilt and search the panels by keywords: personal names, places, organizations or other features.

Madera County, California real property parcel maps can be searched by address and viewed online.

The Sacramento County, California probate court is adding online document images to its Web site. Only cases filed after February 5, 2007 are currently included.

The recent expansion of the role of Arizona Ombudsman-Citizens’ Aide Office will provide a complaint center for addressing public records access violations.

The Indiana Attorney General has an online, searchable database of the legal actions they have initiated against violators of Indiana’s consumer protection laws. Search by county and/or year or view a list by defendant’s name, with links to the public filings and court orders.

The Pasco County, Florida Sheriff has added many new online tools to its Web site: Active calls log, Dispatch log, Subdivision activity log, Inmates in jail, and Outstanding warrants.

The Minnesota Methamphetamine Offenders Registry was approved last July but has just come online this year. A search can be done with an exact match on the last name, or select a county to identify all records. Other states have approved the creation of a database of people convicted of manufacturing meth but only Tennessee currently has this boutique criminal records site.

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension also maintains other criminal offender databases.