Private Investigator Public Records Internet Search Privacy Reporting – PI Buzz

The proposed California Senate Bill 501, “Local government: compensation disclosure”, isn’t an earth-shattering transparency measure. Particularly in light of the Bell city government pay debacle.

The measure would require officers and designated employees to annually file a compensation disclosure form listing their salary and non monetary benefits. I thought the payroll department knew these figures. It seems odd that the employee is providing this. And anyway, what’s a “designated employee”?

“Designated employee” means a designated employee of a county, city, city and county, school district, special district, or joint
powers agency formed pursuant to the Joint Exercise of Powers Act
(Chapter 5 (commencing with Section 6500) of Division 7 of Title 1)
who is required to file a statement of economic interests pursuant to
Chapter 7 (commencing with Section 87100) of Title 9.

Get it? Not every employee must file the disclosure form, just the same people who are required to file a Form 700, Statement of Economic Interests. According to the California Fair Political Practices Commission that is “certain state and local elected officials, judges, high level state employees, and certain employees for the assembly and senate.”

Since the names, job classifications, salary, compensation and retirement benefits of every local and state government employee in California are a public record why aren’t they all online? In fact, this almost never happens. Hermosa Beach may be the only California municipality to post names and salaries of all employees. Trawl through these links for starters.

Just as we have seen a scramble by California local governments to claim the moral high ground by posting salary schedules (post Bell, no workers’ names) on their websites, the same sites may come down if they balk at the bill’s mandate:

If the county, city, city and county, school district, special district, or joint powers agency maintains an Internet Web site, it shall post the information contained on the filed compensation disclosure form on that Internet Web site.

Otherwise, it’s back to fighting the local agencies, and paying the designated fees!

• Web Search : SeekOutWeb – Search Engine

• Surf Canyon Search

  The About.com Web Search Reader’s Choice Award Winner for 2010

• CPAdirectory – Directory Of Certified Public Accountants

  Search across all states from a search engine, use the site query: name site:cpadirectory.com A partial listing. Check with the state government for all licensed CPAs.

• American Association of Attorney-Certified Public Accountants Directory Search

  A partial listing. Check with the state government for all licensed CPAs.

• National Society of Accountants – Directory Search

  A partial listing. Check with the state government for all licensed CPAs.

• Certified Public Accountant – PFS Credential Holder Directory

  A partial listing. Check with the state government for all licensed CPAs.

• Local Health Safety, Environmental and Crime Information

  Find neighborhood features, including demographics, weather, police stations, meth lab ordered clean-ups, sex offenders.

• Companies and Public Employee Salaries

  Salary, name search, public company profiles – Check some public and private employee salaries

• Plagium – Track plagiarism

  Track plagiarism on the Internet.

• California Real Estate & Financial Services License Status Lookup

  "licensing information for the Department of Corporations, Department of Financial Institutions, Department of Real Estate and the Office of Real Estate Appraisers."

• GIMP – The GNU Image Manipulation Program

  "GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software"

• Kngine

  Search based on meaning

• USCIS – H-1B Approved Petitioners Fiscal Year 2009

  U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services approved H-1B petitioner employers

• CataList, the official catalog of LISTSERV lists

  "CataList, the catalog of LISTSERV lists! From this page, you can browse any of the 50,516 public LISTSERV lists on the Internet, search for mailing lists of interest, and get information about LISTSERV host sites. "

• Crime Smasher criminal record background check

  ARREST REPORTS | FEDERAL CRIMINAL COURT DOCKETS | WANTS AND WARRANTS

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Google Scholar is indexing the case law in all 50 states – Court of Appeals and Supreme Court – and the federal courts.

As with the other Google search engines, Google Scholar makes use of its own advanced search operators. Search by keywords, personal names, inclusive dates, and specify one or more states in a single search. Options on a single search are limited to 1) Search all legal opinions and journals; 2) Search only US federal court opinions or, 3) Search only court opinions from self-selected states.

Wondering which courts are included and the inclusive dates? Ask Google Scholar Help:

Which court opinions do you include?

Currently, Google Scholar allows you to search and read opinions for US state appellate and supreme court cases since 1950, US federal district, appellate, tax and bankruptcy courts since 1923 and US Supreme Court cases since 1791 (please check back periodically for updates to coverage information). In addition, it includes citations for cases cited by indexed opinions or journal articles which allows you to find influential cases (usually older or international) which are not yet online or publicly available. Legal opinions in Google Scholar are provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied on as a substitute for legal advice from a licensed lawyer. Google does not warrant that the information is complete or accurate.

View a list of search results with citations and a 2-line summary of text where some or all of the keywords appear. From here you can select to read an entire case or view case summaries that have cited the selected case.

My search query [(garbage OR trash) (curb OR curbside) +privacy], limited to California courts, 1970-2009 returned 33 cases.

A common complaint about search query results from search engines is that too many are unwieldy, returning far more than one can troll though. But that’s also the advantage of search engines — they grab a lot of content. Google makes it easy to build custom search engines of just the websites that you want to search. I’ve created many of these, some of which are in the “Resources” category on PIbuzz.

I’m in California and much of my due diligence work is based here so I have a particular interest in California content. And I want to track California news and issues on public records, open government and law. The newest addition to my search engines is California News, which just searches California newspapers. Select the link, formulate your queries and search content in all California newspapers. Let me know if I’ve missed any.

California legislation that the California Association of Licensed Investigators (CALI) is tracking:

Protection of Consumers through Continuing Education
SB 202 [Harman]

Prohibitions against Use of Credit Report Information
AB 943 [Mendoza]

Meal and Rest Periods & Licensed Private Investigators
SB 287 [Calderon] and SB 380 [Dutton]

Flexible Work Schedules
AB 141 [Tran] and SB 187 [Benoit]

Expansion of Paid Sick Days
AB 1000 [Ma]

Fair Concealed Weapon Application Process
AB 357 [Knight]

Timely Testing of DNA Specimens
SB 439 [Wyland]

Insured’s Access to Accident Reports
AB 470 [Niello]- Support

Peace Officer Identification
SB 169 [Benoit]

Restrictions on Technology
AB 255 [Anderson]

BSIS Posting of Accusations and Disciplinary Actions
SB 599 [Negrete McCleod]

Federal legislation that the National Council of Investigation & Security Services (NCISS) is tracking:

HR-2221 The “Data Accountability and Trust Act” by Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL). A hearing was held earlier this spring. Rep. Rush has pledged to work with another subcommittee chairman on this and other issues relating to the Internet, leading to a vote this summer.

S-139 The “Data Breach Notification Act” by Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA). The bill is pending in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) may introduced his own version of data breach legislation. He pledged earlier this year to make privacy legislation a priority.

HR-122 “Protecting the Privacy of Social Security Numbers Act of 2009″ by Rod Frelinghuysen (R-NJ). We met with the Congressman’s staff to urge that an exemption be provided to permit investigators access to critical information.

S-141 “Protecting the Privacy of Social Security Numbers Act” by Senator Feinstein. Although the bill includes a helpful exception for “business to business” transactions, NCISS is urging a more specific exemption.

HR-1529 “Second Chance for Ex-Offenders Act” by Rep Charles Rangel (D-NY). The bill would provide for expungement of federal criminal records.

S-30 “Truth in Caller ID Act” The bill prohibits “spoofing” with the intent to defraud, cause harm, or wrongfully obtain anything of value”.

HR-1409/S560, the “Employee Free Choice Act” This major labor reform would deny employers the right to obtain a secret ballot vote for organizing efforts and would impose binding arbitration in when no first agreement can be reached. It is labor’s top priority and the fight is led by the SEIU which has attempted to organize guard companies.

Government agencies won’t put public records on the Internet but the former Santa Bernardino County Assessor found a technological runaround to making his emails a public record.

A private investigator and the former supervisor of the Worthless Check Division in the St.Tammany (Louisiana) District Attorney’s Office were sentenced to three years’ probation for buying and selling criminal information from the National Crime Information Center database. The DA employee got the heavier sentence — she also lost her job.

Nebraska Supreme Court ruling: Burial records from a state run cemetery are a public record. The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) claimed that the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) applied because the cemetery was for residents at a former psychiatric hospital. But the court noted that HIPAA allows for the disclosure of protected health information when required by state law, and that Nebraska’s public records laws trumped HIPAA because these are death records, which are open records. Reported by RCFP.

Texas media, private investigators and genealogists are opposing the efforts of the Texas legislature to exempt the dates of birth of government employees from disclosure as a public record. The media has uncovered misdeeds by employees of the Texas Youth Commission — matching dates of birth with employee names — involving abuse of people and the public trust. Shielding dates of birth in public records does not protect the public from identity theft, as legislatures claim when attempting to carve out more public record exemptions.

Next week the U. S. District Court of California will issue the sentence for Lori Drew, the MySpace “cyberbully” who was convicted of violating the MySpace terms of service when she created a false profile. [See my article, Think Twice Before Going Undercover.] In that piece I talk about some of the considerations for the investigator who is tempted to fabricate an identity on a social networking site in order to gain access to a user’s otherwise private profile.

Here’s a legal issue to mull over. Perhaps this applies in other states, but in California, in criminal cases, the criminal defense investigator or prosecution investigator can’t interview a potential witness without first “clearly identifying himself or herself.” This is found in California Penal Code 1054.8:

1054.8. (a) No prosecuting attorney, attorney for the defendant, or investigator for either the prosecution or the defendant shall interview, question, or speak to a victim or witness whose name has been disclosed by the opposing party pursuant to Section 1054.1 or 1054.3 without first clearly identifying himself or herself, identifying the full name of the agency by whom he or she is employed, and identifying whether he or she represents, or has been retained by, the prosecution or the defendant. If the interview takes place in person, the party shall also show the victim or witness a business card, official badge, or other form of official identification before commencing the interview or questioning.
(b) Upon a showing that a person has failed to comply with this section, a court may issue any order authorized by Section 1054.5.

A violation could lead to the exclusion of the evidence obtained from that interview. Isn’t the investigator attempting to “interview, question, or speak” to a witness when the investigator accesses the witness’s non-public social network profile? The private profile requires the participants be accepted as “friends” and is a mouthpiece for the account holder to speak to her selected audience. The investigator who disguises his identity to pry open that witness’s cyber door could risk the exclusion of any evidence gathered through that pretext, as well as picking up a misdemeanor.

The phrase “personal information” and “identity theft” have become so intertwined that legislatures have rushed to implement laws which have detrimental outcomes for investigations. Recently codified New York law would subject employers to a $500 penalty for disclosing “personal identifying information” on employees. This will have a chilling effect on release by employers of other information on current or past employees, such as name and job title. This is reminiscent of the California legislature’s failed attempt in 2007 to penalize the release of “personal information about a customer or employee contained in the records of a business…”

It is now a violation of New York law to,

Communicate an employee’s personal identifying information to the general public. For purposes of this section, “personal identifying information” shall include social security number, home address or telephone number, personal electronic mail address, Internet identification name or password, parent’s surname prior to marriage, or drivers’ license number.

Hat Tip: Lexology

The governor of Alabama signed an executive order that creates an online database of all state government spending and legislators’ relationships with lobbyists. This will go online later this year, but many other states have already made available government spending, salary and revenue databases, often in a site dedicated to issues of transparency in government.

Review the Nevada state budget by general revenue, expenditures, departments or function at Nevada Open Government. Also, lookup vendors with state contracts.

Open Georgia includes a searchable database of state employees and their salaries.

South Carolina gathers together links to their various online databases including, state expenditures and salaries.

Similar sites have been assembled by Kentucky, Rhode Island (also see, Transparency Train) and South Dakota.

Transparency rankings and states with spending online are listed at Sunshine Review.

Track transparency in government spending issues reported by independent organizations in Colorado and Illinois.

Legislation, citizen activism and current news on state government transparency can be found at the Center for Fiscal Accountability.

A California appellate court has settled a public records case — the right of access to a Santa Clara County GIS parcel mapping database — in favor of the plaintiffs, the California First Amendment Coalition. The county alternately demanded an exorbitant fee to access the database, then claimed that it was protected for national security reasons, even though they had already sold it to some private parties. Huh? Unbelievably, Santa Clara County argued that release of the digital maps might make the water supply a target for terrorists? Pleeease…

Support the CFAC’s efforts to keep government records open and express your appreciation for their free legal hotline.

In another, but unfortunate court decision, the Third Appellate District court exempted from disclosure crime-related autopsy records, claiming they are encompassed under the California Public Records Act exception for police “investigatory files”.

The final report issued by the Florida Commission on Open Government Reform recommends how the State of Florida can make its government records more accessible to the public. The report should be read by anyone concerned with open government and the future of public records in Florida. Among the proposed changes in the law, the panel suggests that investigations of complaints filed against professional licensees would become a public record after the case is closed. The Commission proposes enhanced electronic access to government records, lifting the restriction on release of lists of retirees, reducing fees for some public records and opening child abuse and adult mistreatment investigations. Read the press.

Reversing a lower court, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that some autopsy records should be disclosed to the public. Maybe the coroners will further open those records in the advent of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Right To Know Law, which explicitly places the burden of proof on the government for justifying why a document is not a public record.

The Texas Attorney General has finally around to offering a service previously available in most other states: a charities online database. A search using the Texas Charitable Organizations Search Tool returns a summary of the organization, sometimes with a revenue graph, and a link to the IRS 990 forms. As of this date none of the 990 forms were yet available. Search by these fields, individually or in combination: organization name or word in the name, city, state, type of activity and employer identification number. An information page explains how to read a form 990 and links to other charity lookups.

Find the Florida charities search (“Gift Givers’ Guide”) buried deep in the Division of Consumer Services site.

The Iowa legislature is chewing over the notion that open government records may be responsible for identity theft and should be restricted. The Identity Theft Prevention Study Committee met last month and developed a collection of recommendations, including redacting certain “personal information” — that fuzzy term has yet to be defined — in public records. One of the panelists, Dan Combs of The Coalition for Sensible Public Records Access , a consortium of commercial public records aggregators, argued that redaction of public records is ineffectual and misses the supposed objective of curtailing “identity theft”, another fuzzy term. The Coalition site has position papers and summaries on public records access, such as this one on the important uses of the Social Security number by businesses and government.

What other constructive uses of the SSN identifier would you add?

Now, head down to Arizona where the Phoenix City Attorney has advised the police department to restrict disclosure of police records on the handy claim that thieves are scouring public records for personal information. The police department will start redacting victim names, birth dates of suspects AND those who are convicted and sitting in jail, and the addresses where crimes are committed. The dictum is being unevenly enforced, different types of data being excised, or not at all. Phoenix may expand this scattered policy to include code enforcement records. Which state law is this suppose to comport with?

A database of convicted drunk drivers is slated to go online by the end of 2008, hosted by the Ohio Department of Public Safety. Ohio’s SB 17 mandates the creation of an Internet registry listing personal information on repeat offenders. Read the press release that details the characteristics of the Habitual OVI/OMWI Offender Registry.

All offenders having 5 or more OVI/OMWI convictions (or equivalent offenses) in the past 20 years must be listed on the Registry, to include:
• Offender’s name
• Date of birth
• Residential address including street address, municipal corporation or township, county and zip code
• Number of times within the preceding 20 years the offender has been convicted of an OVI/OMWI violation
• Dates of OVI/OMWI violation

The Registry must be made available to the public online, to be searchable by the offender’s name, county or zip code.

Add this to the growing collection of boutique criminal registries.

The Texas Attorney General is employing various media – screen shots, video, press releases and court documents – to broadcast its recent shuttering of USA Skiptrace, AMS Research Services, Inc. and Worldwide Investigations, Inc. for selling consumers’ private telephone records and impersonating those account holders. These businesses were based in Colorado but conducted business in Texas when they called Texas telecommunications companies.

The Office of the Attorney General charged USA Skiptrace with violating the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. The corporate defendants were ordered to pay $150,000 in civil penalties, with John Strange also responsible for a separate fine of $2,500.

Do you think that the telephone companies might someday send customers automatic email alerts notifying them of inquires?

Northwestern University hosts this searchable database of homicides in Chicago that occurred between 1870 and 1930. The mandatory search field is street name, but many other criteria can be added.

Read the description of this massive project, transferring handwritten records to a digital format.

The Chicago Historical Homicide Project began with the discovery of the availability of a rich log of more than 11,000 homicides maintained consistently and without interruption by the Chicago Police Department over the course of 60 years, from 1870 to 1930.

A search by street name returns a list of records with a short case summary. This image is about half of the data from one of those records.

Public records researchers will appreciate the pop up window of sources for related original documents.

The one change to the database I would wish for is to be able to search by name, but the option to download the data in an Excel file should remedy that limitation.

Formal disciplinary actions against a California Emergency Medical Technician will now be available as a public record, thanks to AB 2917, signed by the governor today.

AB 2917 will provide the public with with certification and licensure information and create an EMT registry, specified by Section 1797.117 of the Health and Safety Code.

The legislation details the personal information that will be a public record, which is similar to that which is available on other California professional licensees.

The information made available to the public through the centralized registry system shall include all of the following data elements: the full name of every individual who has been issued an EMT-I or EMT-II certificate or EMT-P license, the name of the entity that issued the certificate or license, the certificate or license number, the date of issuance of the license or certificate, and the license or certificate status.

All disciplinary records of Arizona government employees become public records September 28, 2008. Arizona Revised Statutes adds section 39-128, Disciplinary records of public officers and employees; disclosure; exceptions.

Release of home address, telephone number and photograph of people in certain job categories (law enforcement) is restricted.

The Arizona Ombudsman produces a monthly educational newsletter, The Public Law. A recent issue offers agencies guidance that speaks to the complaints of private investigators, reporters, and all those who request public records. Read, Public Records Law 101: Avoid the top ten most common pitfalls.

Alaska, Hawaii, Nebraska and Iowa are among the few states that have a statewide ombudsman office.

Does your state have an open records law related to government employee discipline records?

The Missouri Secretary of State now has a statewide Voter Information Lookup online. Enter the person’s first and last name, county and street name. If you’ve correctly matched that personal information, you have to select the correct street address, as you can see in this image.

Then you’ll get a confirmation that the person is registered to vote.

If you can rely on current voter registration status to verify where someone lives, then this could be useful.

Have you found that the voter registration lookup sites return valuable information?

The names of jurors are public records, according to a ruling by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which countered the actions of a Pennsylvania federal judge who kept the juror names from the media in a high-profile trial. Apparently, the 3rd Circuit believes that’s not the norm in federal court, but the reality on the ground is a bit mixed. It’s a different world in state courts, many of which have an explicit ban on releasing the names of jurors.

The Empire Center for New York State Policy has begun to build databases to make New York government more transparent. Just today, the Center’s project, SeeThruNY unveiled a database of names and salaries for more than 263,000 employees of New York’s state government. Search their other databases of New York government contracts and expenditures.

The Massachusetts Supreme Court is proposing new procedures that, if adopted, would curtail the available personal information in all court files. The court is accepting public comments on its Interim Guidelines for the Protection of Personal Identifying Data in Publicly Accessible Court Documents.

The document proposes redaction of particular personally identifying information in court filings.

Except as provided in these guidelines, a document filed with a court should not include a complete version of any of the following personal identifying data elements. Instead, the filer should redact information from any pre-existing document, or omit information from any document prepared for filing, so that the document includes:
(1) in the case of a social security number, taxpayer identification number, credit card or other financial account number, driver’s license number, or passport number, only the last four digits;
(2) in the case of a birth date, only the year of birth, rather than the exact day or month; and
(3) in the case of a name identified as the mother’s maiden name of a person, only the first initial of that name.

The Pennsylvania Treasury Department has launched a database of state government agency goods and services contracts. Search by any combination of contractor, contracting agency, contract amount or date range. This primarily includes contracts entered into or renewed on or after July 1, 2008. See the FAQ’s for database parameters.

The University of New Mexico is revising its policies on access to public records and disclosure of personal information. One of the additions to the list of public record information on University employees is job application, resume or curriculum vitae. The policy changes will be voted on at the August 2008 UNM Board of Regents meeting.

Juror names and jury questionnaires are public records and subject to disclosure even if a trial judge has made promises to the contrary. At least in North Dakota. A ruling by that state’s Supreme Court, cited by the Associated Press, rebuffed a trial court’s claim that the records in one case were sealed out of fear that the jurors could be harassed.

“We conclude those reasons, by themselves, are insufficient to rebut the presumption of openness and to warrant a blanket closure in this case…”

Court rulings may seem like a bouncing ball when it comes to privacy, public records and electronic messaging. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has asserted that companies do not have an automatic right to access employees’ text messages if the data is stored on outside servers. Read more about this decision and the significance for privacy and data management. Some other news stories on email access and public records can be found at WikiFOIA.

Maybe it’s a trend in the refinement of the sex offender databases and regulation of where registered sex offenders can live.Tennessee has joined Indiana (see this court ruling on the Indiana law), Missouri, Kentucky and Alaska requiring registered sex offenders submit their email addresses, which are being added to those state online databases. States can’t keep track of the physical location of registrants so the email address disclosure may not be of much value to public safety.

Government agencies in California can’t assign control of records that would otherwise be public records to a private entity. SB 1696 enrolled. New Law Allows Greater Access to Government Contracts, PolitickerCA.com, Adam Keigwin.

A Pennsylvania open records blog reports that the recent overhaul of the Pennsylvania Right To Know Law includes a requirement that records held by private companies doing business with the government may be a public record.

Emails on the private home computers of government appointees serving on a foundation benefiting public schools are public records, according to an opinion by the North Dakota Attorney General.

I recently discovered that police records in Arizona, even in open investigations, are public records. Public Records Free Directory blog reports that new legislation requires government employee disciplinary records be disclosed, with a provision that police officer’s home addresses are protected.