I did have one techie admit that he learned something new at the presentation I did for the Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyers Association. Their Sunny Climate Seminar is held every year in Hawaii, very painful…

Almost as soon as I minted my PowerPoint, So You Think You Know Google? (see an edited version), Google released design changes to Google Maps and added a new feature, SearchWiki, to Web search. SearchWiki — a search results comment feature that can be public or private — is potentially an investigative tool to see what people are saying about incidents and people and companies in the news. But SearchWiki may die before much of a database of comments develops because the addition has been fairly negatively received. Read more about this at Internet News. In a trial search example, enter “searchwiki” in the Google search box then scroll to the bottom of the search results page. Click on “All notes for this SearchWiki” and start reading the comments by selecting the link under the URL of each search result.

There are other blogs that are featuring screenshots and discussing all the new features on Google Maps Street View, but one feature improvement stood out to me — the revamped 360 degree rotate. Now, in the Street View image just hold your mouse button on the “N” on the circular dial as you move around the circle to get smoother, more incremental views of the street scene. An addition that I’ve long wished for has been added, although it’s not as seamless as the new panorama rotate, the “look up”/”look down” function. Remember zooming to get a good shot of a street address only to have it disappear from view? Now you can zoom, then elevate or lower the view for the enjoyment of a tall building (but no simulated scaling of the building) or to get a closer glance at the part of the frame that disappeared in the older Street View version.

One last Google note for those of you who use gmail. You no longer need fear a panic attack on the discovery that your email account has been swallowed by the cybermonster. Thanks to Inter Alia for the pointer to Gmail Backup.

Background Screening and Investigations: Managing Hiring Risk from the HR and Security Perspectives is a wide-ranging guide to the technology, resources, policies and procedures, and trends in employment screening. A road map for Human Resource decision makers who are screening potential hires and current employees or who are evaluating outside background screening companies, Background Screening and Investigations adds depth to the extensive topics covered, without being overly technical.

The target audience is primarily the employer businesses, not the providers of background check services. Private investigators just getting into the background screening business or those smaller providers who want to brush up on recommended practices and the trends in the industry will also find this a valuable guide. Also, the findings from surveys of the screening practices and objectives of employers is essential for anyone who wants to offer a responsive screening service.

Sandwiched within the essays by over a dozen specialists in the legal, standards setting and metrics, service provider and security/risk analysis arenas are short-hand chapter highlights, and summaries from the differing perspectives of those in human resources and workplace security. There’s a lot here.

Background Screening and Investigations helps employers think through setting screening policies and practices and whether to outsource, as the vast majority do. Niche services and the expected components of a thorough background screening process have expanded with innovations in data collection. This book describes and evaluates the value of various services — those that are standard and others that are not as regularly employed — such as identity verification, drug testing, reference checks, hand-checks of court records and international screening. With the proliferation of resellers of aggregated electronic criminal records the public and employers may be lulled by the myth of a national criminal records database. There is no substitute — in either comprehensiveness or accuracy — for examining the criminal records index at the courthouse.

The legal mandates for employers and background screening agencies are sufficiently complex that you’ll want to peruse this guide for pre and post hire tips.

Review the Table of Contents and first chapter.

Sign up for The Background Buzz newsletter to receive news of current events in pre-employment.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project report, Teens and Social Media, supports the continuing importance of the Internet for due diligence, background, employment and skip tracing investigations, as well as, reputation research and even surveillance for legal and insurance matters.

Some 93% of teens use the internet, and more of them than ever are treating it as a venue for social interaction – a place where they can share creations, tell stories, and interact with others.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that 64% of online teens ages 12-17 have participated in one or more among a wide range of content-creating activities on the internet, up from 57% of online teens in a similar survey at the end of 2004.

39% of online teens share their own artistic creations online, such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos, up from 33% in 2004.

33% create or work on webpages or blogs for others, including those for groups they belong to, friends, or school assignments, basically unchanged from 2004 (32%).

28% have created their own online journal or blog, up from 19% in 2004.

27% maintain their own personal webpage, up from 22% in 2004.

In short, most teens are using the Internet and over a quarter of them have Web pages or blogs and even more post photos. Also, commentary by teens can be mined for information on their parents - who may be jurors, experts, plaintiffs, defendants, claimants or witnesses - for background, employment, insurance or locate investigations.

Previously, I wrote about the increasing reliance by employers on Internet research.

In my conference presentations, I give examples of my Internet research that uncovered photographs, identified current employment and personal and business involvements of subjects. At the Annual Meeting of the California Bar, Carole Levitt and I presented, Social Networking Sites: The Newest Investigative Tool On The Internet. Carole cited a University of Wisconsin analysis that found teens limit the personal identifiers they post online. It’s essential in constructing your search queries to know that “40 percent of the profiles included the youth’s first name, and about 9 percent included their full name.” To be effective, the researcher should combine first name with other personal identifiers commonly used at that particular social networking site.

Many online court case name lookups also have document images. Some court indexes, as in the one provided by Alameda County, California, only have search and retrieval of documents by case number.

The Sacramento County Court Case Management System (CCMS) provides access to case file documents for recently filed Civil and Probate cases.

You can view all documents on Trust and Estate cases initiated after February 5, 2007 as well as all Probate Notes for hearings after February 5, 2007. You can view all documents on Civil cases (excluding Small Claims and Unlawful Detainer cases) for cases initiated after November 13, 2007 as well as Case Management Program Tentative Rulings for hearings after November 13, 2007.

It’s not as seamless as it should be. Ideally, you could conduct a name search in the Sacramento Court Name Index System to retrieve a case number and links to the documents. But the current setup requires searching in two steps, if you are searching by name and then want to get the case documents.

View the tutorial by selecting the orange and blue figures in the lower right corner of the image. Then you’ll be directed to the Slideshare site. Look at the full screen slideshow by selecting “Full” in the lower right corner of the image.

| View | Upload your own

What are the parameters at your local court Web site for viewing document images online?

The profile you proudly blast across the Internet today may be one that makes you cringe tomorrow. Perhaps this is more the case as the general use of the Internet grows out of adolescence. You need not quake because for every Web faux pas there is a fee-based solution. DefendMyName claims to “replace negative Internet postings with positive information about you or your business” and to elevate your propaganda above the negative portrayals found through the search engines. Essentially, this service finds relevant social networking sites and adds your profile, and posts your personal image press release on relevant business and industry forums.

ReputationDefender speaks to the fear of the job seeker or parent that there may be some virtual image that needs cleansing. After they find these declarations (much of that, no doubt, created by the subject), reputationdefender sets about contacting “third parties, including creators of unwelcome content, hosts of unwelcome content, and other parties who might have control or authority over such content.” The User Agreement addresses any inclination you may have to engage this service targeting someone other than yourself. Search engine optimization is a more technical phrase for much of what these companies do. Here’s another one.

I guess I can classify my work as reputation research, which I do on behalf of others, not for the purpose of scrubbing an online image but to build a biography of admissions and activities. Researchers and investigators have always done this, but the popularity of the Internet has opened an area of specialized research. Social networking sites, which have been mined by companies for background on potential hires, have also connected people who want to find each other.

Authenticating found material may be difficult due to the anonymous uses of the Internet. Inevitably, people will use this shield to present favorable views of themselves while disguised in a persona. Be warned: Those who “anonymously” say nasty things about others may be uncovered and sued. The ability to alter digital content could have important implications for the dissemination and identification of official government documents and information.

Getting concrete about the work of uncovering reputation for professional uses, the authors of, Finding and Researching Experts and Their Testimony, offer a detailed guide to finding background and verifying credentials of various types of experts. Some of the sources discussed are: use of search engines, expert directories, the expert’s Web site, licensing boards, publications, news, discussion board posts, court dockets and other public records.

An older set of articles on researching people on the Internet is a good introduction.

Various sources for finding background on people are listed at People Finder Guide.

There are actually enough bloggers consistently writing on FOIA, open government and access to public records that we now have our own Carnival - a rotating group of writers who do regular round ups of the“Best posts from the FOIA-sphere.”

This week, Leslie Graves of State Sunshine and Open Records is our host. I encourage you to take a glance and discover some new blogs.

While I’m in the referral vein let me introduce you to an invaluable Internet research reference manual, The Lawyer’s Guide To Fact Finding On the Internet. Don’t be put off by the word lawyer. This guide is for hands-on researchers who could benefit from an Internet taming charm. And who couldn’t?

The authors are Internet research trainers and this book reflects their expert training instincts in the way the material is organized and presented. This collection of detailed reviews of Web sites - sorted by subject (not a dread alphabetical list) - is a reference manual any level of information researcher can use to find, well, facts! Chapter topics include search strategies, search engines, public records, government sources, finding and backgrounding people and company research. These are just a few areas covered in this 800 page Internet investigator’s bible. Each listing has the Web site location, whether or not a fee is associated with any part of the site, the content you’ll find here, the authors’ rating and tips on how to use the site. View the Table of Contents, the Index and a sample entry to get a sense of just how fabulous a resource the authors have assembled.

The news that Google is assisting some states with indexing their online public records content has been repeated in the mainstream press, without shedding much light on the what or how. The Arizona Government Technology Agency does a better job, detailing the agency records that are included and the nature of the indexing.

To improve access to State information, Arizona technology managers have been working with Google to implement the Sitemap Protocol for online State databases. This protocol enables a website owner to communicate the contents of a web accessible database to commercial search engines so that information in the database can be indexed and searched by commercial search engines. Pilot Sitemaps have been implemented at the Arizona Governor’s Office, the Arizona Registrar of Contractors, AHCCCS, and the Departments of Administration, Health Services, Public Safety, and Real Estate.

Most public records indexes require the searcher to go to the government site and use that site’s search mechanism to find individual personal information records. But many of these will now be accessible through a general search engine, bringing part of the deep Web to the surface Web.

Here are three different query formulations that you can perform in Google of the Arizona Department of Real Estate licensee records, the first two of which return the same result - pointing to the Arizona government record. The third lists the same result in the 3rd Google entry.

The order of the first and last name has to correspond to that in the public record if you put the terms within quotations.

“STRADLING, REBECCA” arizona real estate license

“STRADLING, REBECCA” site:azre.gov

rebecca STRADLING “real estate”

The State of Arizona also has a Google custom search engine, where you can perform the same search, but only searching Arizona “State Agencies, Boards and Commissions, Legislative Government, Counties, Cities and Towns, and Tribes.” In this case, the same name search, without quotes, returns a manageable 10 records. If needed, you can then refine the results to the appearance of the terms in only legislative, state, county or city Web sites.

Charities and non profit organizations are monitored by state agencies and the Internal Revenue Service, and tracked by many private advocacy groups. Even if you’re not particularly interested in a specific charitable organization you might want to know the people and other entities with which they’re associated. Business journalism reporter Bill Smith developed a guide to analyzing the IRS 990 forms that nonprofits are required to submit. He also links to the advocacy groups, Charity Navigator, BBB Wise Giving Alliance and Guide Star where you can get the document images of the IRS 990 forms filed by the charities. Ministry Watch and The Foundation Center have background on nonprofits that aren’t required to file IRS form 990.

Bookmark this IRS site that lists links to each states’ charity regulator, either the Attorney General or Secretary of State, where you’ll be able to lookup details on the charitable organization.

Search for a tax deductible organization by partial name in all 50 states at once.

The government pursuit of private investigators, lawyers and corporate officers caught in the HP and Pellicano imbroglios have raised awareness of some off-color investigative practices. Many of these - pretexting for customer telephone records and obtaining personal financial documents without authorization - are illegal under federal and some state laws. Despite the close working relationship of attorneys and investigators, “42 percent of organizations responded that they currently do not have written guidelines against the use of of these methods”, according to a Deloitte Financial Advisory Services Online Poll, Many Companies Lack Formal Guidelines Against Pretexting In Internal Investigations.

Fraud and human resource investigations (which are often conducted in-house, not by licensed private investigators) are the primary areas where the illegal activities arise. Deloitte lists recommendations for companies hiring investigators, among which are, “be wary of investigators who say they can get bank account information or information only available to law enforcement.”

Many law firms are now requiring their private investigators sign contracts where there were none before and adding new language to agreements specifying, “investigator will comply with all federal, state and local laws concerning fraud, “pretexting”, privacy, wiretapping and the Fair Credit Reporting Act.” Before long law firms will issue their PI a checklist of acceptable and unauthorized practices!

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.

MelissaData, the marketing list service, has free information lookup databases, some drawn from government records, of boundary maps, city and county names and zip codes, public school locators and statistical data. Like most of these free sources, there is a fee component, often overpriced for the value of the information. Among them are people locators - “People Finder” and “Search Expert”, the later of which purports that “Search Expert are people trained in information databases and investigations” - which appear to connect to the Intellius/Confi-chek database.

It’s informative to lookup the domain that the “People Finder” is associated with. I entered “Tamara Thompson” and California in the People Finder Lookup search box, which is at the MelissaData site. The search brings up a list of names, ages, towns and possible associates - a fee is exacted to find out more - at a domain registered to Confi-chek, which looks like the Intellius search result product. This is funny because Confi-chek was sued by Intelius last year for trademark infringement.