Private Investigator Public Records Internet Search Privacy Reporting - PI Buzz

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?

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.

The Marin Independent Journal prevailed in its 2 year tussle with the county to obtain county employees salaries, finally decided by the 1st District Court of Appeal. And the newspaper has made county salary data available at its Web site. Salaries of earners over $100, 000 can be searched by name or agency at the Marin Independent Journal. I have a link to this and all other salary databases across the USA that I’ve been able to identify.

The Missouri Attorney General is seeking to shut down Web sites that sell personal information, such as Social Security numbers, to the general public on Missouri residents. The current lawsuit names A1 Peoplesearch, LLC. A recently prior action seeks to stop Publicdata.com from selling the same type of personal information. Even though the companies are based outside Missouri they are selling data with Social Security numbers and dates of birth of Missouri residents. The Jackson County Circuit court issued a restraining order last week prohibiting A1peoplesearch “from selling such information about Missourians or allowing consumers to search its database using Missourians’ Social Security numbers.”

The New Jersey Supreme Court has broken new ground in its ruling that Internet service providers cannot release users’ personal information without a valid subpoena. A local police department investigating a possible computer access crime submitted a subpoena to the Internet Service Provider that wasn’t associated with any filed court case. The court determined that under the New Jersey constitution residents have more extensive privacy rights than provided in the U.S. constitution.

I was setting out to write about state lookup and registration of “Do Not Call” and “No Call” phone numbers. More on this in a moment. I’m diverging to mention a few voter registration lookup links. The Federal Voting Assistance Program, U.S. Department of Defense collects links to State Voter Registration Verification Web sites. The participating states provide this service for residents to confirm their voter registration status. The sites may variously require a name, date of birth, street number or address to verify whether the individual is registered to vote.

A few non governmental sites that collect links to public records have a category dedicated to voter records. Black Book Online has 63 links to city, county or state government voter registration lookup. Search Systems has some additional links, but there are variations in both collections. And neither has Southington, Connecticut Voter Registration Lookup included. Imagine that! Read my prior posts on voter registration verification.

Okay, on to Do-Not-Call phone lookup sites. The Tennessee Do-Not-Call Citizen Registration Lookup returns a street number match to the provided telephone number. The Missouri Registration Lookup for No Call List verifies whether a phone number is on the list and the date it was registered.

Do you know of other voter confirmation or Do-Not-Call registration sites?

The County of Santa Clara released a document listing the salaries of county employees in response to a Public Records Act request by the San Jose Mercury News. At any other time they probably wouldn’t have considered this a public record, but the recent California Supreme Court decision doesn’t leave an opening for government agencies to oppose release. The 389 page document covers Santa Clara County employees from June 19, 2006 through June 17, 2007.

The City of San Jose employee salary database for 2006 is also at the San Jose Mercury (registration required), or you can print the list, organized by salary, at the PI buzz Documents page. Both lists include employee name, job position and compensation.

South Dakota state government employees salaries are searchable by name or position. SouthDakotaInfo, the Argus Leader Web page of information databases, is listed among the media collections on my What’s New At… page, as is an expanded list of Missouri databases.

Add other resources to the California public records database links, PRA letter generator and government agencies that are being compiled at WikiFOIA. Other states are also here. If you want a good collection of all types of government databases go to the wiki, GODORT. Like any wiki, you can register and contribute sites to either of these.

The Missouri Attorney General has unveiled a database of filed consumer complaints that can be searched by company name or partial name.The database includes more than 100,000 complaints filed since January 1, 2004. View the complaint number, type of complaint, the number of complaints and the date filed. The site does not provide any information on whether the complaint was pursued by the Attorney General or what the result of any investigation might have been.

The Tennessee Sexual Offender Registry has been expanded to include mapping and photographs of all offenders, and more offenders than were previously on the Web site. Registry of sex offenders expanding, Chattanooga Times Free Press, July 27, 2007.

In advance of any state law, the Rockland County, New York Clerk has installed software that will remove Social Security numbers from the online version of recorded documents. According to this article, New York state tax liens now use a different number than the Social Security number on documents.

A bill signed by the governor of North Carolina will marginally facilitate the reconnection of birth parents and the children they relinquished for adoption. If both parties agree, the adoption placement services will act as confidential intermediaries, providing the birth parents and adult children with each other’s contact information.

The Missouri Department of Corrections unveiled its offender search database last month.The site is down due to technical difficulties but will hopefully be accessible soon.

The offender search link includes the offender’s name, DOC ID number, race, sex, date of birth, assigned location, sentence summary, active offenses, completed offenses and any aliases.

The Missouri Supreme Court has once again concluded that people whose criminal convictions did not require them to register as sex offenders cannot later be included in the sex offender registry. An unknown number of names will be trimmed from the current database.

John Hotz, a spokesman for the Missouri Highway Patrol, which maintains the sex offender registry, said officials will now have to comb through the more than 7,000 names on the registry to determine who is affected.

After last year’s ruling, the state determined that more than 3,800 names were on the list for crimes committed before 1995, Hotz said. The state continues to allow information about those prior offenders to be published.

Many states and local municipalities have rosters of city, county and state public officials available in a single PDF document that can be saved to your computer for later reference. Don’t confuse these rosters with the state telephone directories, which list key individuals in state government and their departments. Rosters provide names of elected and appointed officials and associated agency, with street addresses, email addresses and Web sites. Save this to your computer or print it out so you’ll know to whom to direct your public records requests.

The California Secretary of State describes the California Roster, which is online, for each of the past 5 years.

The California Roster, also known as the Roster of Public Officials, is a listing of California’s public officeholders, including our United States government officials, the Constitutional officers, members of the State Senate and Assembly, the Judicial branch, county officials, and Incorporated city and town officials.

It also includes a history of California’s office holders, descriptions of the state emblems, a listing of all state agencies, departments, boards and commissions, a listing of the unincorporated areas, and information on the state officials for each state in the nation.

The current Missouri Roster details every executive, legislative and judicial office holder, as well as each county commissioner and department director.

Some counties also publish a Roster, which, like this one produced by the San Diego County Registrar of Voters, contain the same information down to the city level.

The Iowa Roster is located at the legislative site.

The Rhode Island Department of Administration Web site has the Directory of City and Town Officials, along with many other government publications. So you may have to search various government Web sites to find where a Roster is housed.

There are also 50 state directories of single agency types. Montana has a Roster of State Livestock Health Officials.

Suddenly, government directories have become more intriguing.

A few months ago I wrote about the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control maintains License Query System. An added feature to the ABC site is daily, weekly and annual reports of new licenses, license status changes and actions taken against licenses including, revocations, suspensions, fines, and issuance or denial of licenses. The database of reports cannot be searched at the site. Search the archived reports from September 16, 2006 to the present by using this advanced search at Google. Replace “Safeway” with your company name, address or other key words.

safeway site:www.abc.ca.gov/reports/

Reporters and anyone compiling statistical data will be able to make use of the reports menu at the ABC site. Query the reports by location and license type to get a detail of all that meet that criteria. For example, find all the caterer licensees in Azusa.

Washington State law now bans employer access to the credit reports of employees or potential employees unless such information is substantially related to the individual’s current or potential job responsibilities. An exception is made if the employer has a “reasonable cause to believe” that the employee “has engaged in specific activity that constitutes a violation of law.”

Missouri private investigators are poised to receive the stamp of legitimacy with the establishment of the Board of Private Investigator Examiners, which will license and regulate private investigators. The bill is awaiting the governor’s signature, which is expected this summer. The Missouri Association of Private Investigators has worked diligently to secure state level licensing and soon they’ll be able to join the majority of states that license PIs.

New regulations for Indiana private investigators will go into effect July 1, including the replacement of the term “private detective” with “private investigator”.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court will decide whether property assessment databases created on behalf of municipalities by private companies are a public records.

Legislation introduced in Pennsylvania would make it a crime to obtain, sell or receive phone records of state residents without their authorization.

An initiative on the California ballot that would require police officers “create an audio-visual recording of all contacts with or searches of citizens” is now gathering signatures. If approved by the voters, the measure would mandate that “a copy of the recording be provided to affected citizens who are arrested and charged with a crime.”

The recent closure of police disciplinary records throughout California has prompted the introduction of AB 1648, Peace officer records, which would make information in certain disciplinary records pertaining to peace officers available to the public.

The swinging legislative pendulum in Missouri would restrict the release of police internal affairs records. Michigan already has limited access to police discipline files.

Should private investigators have access to police disciplinary reports or officer activity videotapes?

The Missouri News is reporting the latest news on a bill introduced by Sen. Harry Kennedy, (D) of St. Louis. Missouri is only one of 6 remaining states that does not regulate private investigators. This bill would also include continuing educational requirements for all licensees.

The proposed bill includes a grandfather clause that would allow current private investigators to become certified if they have been in good standing as a business for two years. They would also have to provide proof of liability and workers’ compensation insurance.

The Senate Financial Committee on Monday heard Kennedy’s bill, which would also create a statewide board to license and regulate private investigators throughout the state.

Even though a representative of the Missouri Association of Private Investigators testified in favor of the bill, there was at least one PI who testified against it.

Do you feel private investigators should be licensed? What are the pros and cons of licensing as you see it? This is a very important topic as many of the remaining unlicensed states are fighting for licensing.

What do you think?

You may have noticed that there’s a trend toward eliminating personal identifiers - social security numbers, dates of birth and addresses - from all public records. Any publicly filed documents containing social security numbers are subject to being altered, removing the SSN identifier, or rejected until the personal information is redacted. Currently, financial records, tax liens, deeds and mortgage loan documents are being changed to the extent that it will become impossible to verify whether a federal, state or municipal tax lien belongs to a particular individual.

Fraud investigators, people finders, heir locators, financial lenders and journalists checking on the fitness of our politicians all rely on the unique identifier to develop background and verify identity.

The complete social security number is being removed from filed documents, not just from the Internet indexes and images. And guess what? The commercial databases aren’t going to be able to provide search results that cross reference SSNs on tax liens or judgments filed with county recorder’s offices with a name or address. The indexes of the data resellers are only as good as the original records.

The Missouri Secretary of State just announced that she’s removed the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) document images from the Web site.

The Secretary of State’s Office is taking every step possible to protect personal identification information (Social Security Numbers and Federal Identification Numbers) while continuing to provide service to our customers. As part of that effort, our office has temporarily removed Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) images from the web site as they may inadvertently contain personal identification information.

Although the Virginia legislature has yet to enact a pending bill that would remove SSNs from land records and court filings, Nevada county recorders are rejecting filings that contain social security numbers. This new requirement has created a mess in the courts because the County Clerk is required to submit affirmations that the “5,000 documents filed every day in District Court” have the social security numbers removed. Even in the relatively lower volume state of Vermont the county clerks are overwhelmed by the mandate to extract SSNs from previously submitted documents. The Kansas legislature apparently didn’t consider the costly (both personal and financial, to government and business) consequences of redacting data, declaring that

Unless required by federal law, no document available for public inspection or copying shall contain an individual’s social security number if such document contains such individual’s personal information.

Personal information is name, address, phone number or e-mail address. This applies to

documents recorded in the official records of any recorder of deeds of the county or to any documents filed in the official records of the court and shall be included, but not limited to, such documents of any records that when filed constitutes:
(1) A consensual or nonconsensual lien;

(2) an eviction record;
(3) a judgment;
(4) a conviction or arrest;
(5) a bankruptcy;
(6) a secretary of state filing; or
(7) a professional license.

Humm, no name on a professional license…

All of the 50 state governments will eventually succumb to this “identity theft” protection measure on court records, UCC filings and mortgage loan documents.

Why don’t these state legislatures follow the federal model, masking only part of the SSN, which achieves the aims of fraud prevention while keeping the unique association of the number with a name?

AP reports on the site additions to Missouri’s sex offender database.

An updated state Internet site promoted Monday by Gov. Matt Blunt can create maps detailing every registered sex offender living, working or attending school within 1,000 feet to 15 miles of any particular address.

The new Web site also includes physical descriptions of registered sex offenders - height, weight, race, eye and hair color, scars and tattoos - and, when available, a description of the vehicles they drive. Also online are the ages and genders of the offenders’ victims.

The recently enacted national sex offender registry legislation, HR 4472, Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, will add convicted child molesters to the registry and require all states to notify residents of sex offender registrants.

New York adds level 2 sex offenders to its registry. The Florida site has added more details on the convictions of registrants. The future state of the registry for Missouri is in flux since the Missouri Supreme Court decided that current registrants convicted prior to 1995 do not have to update their address information.

Minnesota is now the third state to approve a registry of methamphetamine manufacturers, following on the heels of the Tennessee registry, which is already on the Web. The Illinois registry has been signed into law but is not yet online.

South Dakota and Oregon have had county based sex offender lookups that are now integrated into their statewide sex offender registries. Each are online at their state sites and at the National Sex Offender Public Registry operated by DOJ. The DOJ site also includes searches in the District of Columbia and the territory of Guam.

The Ohio legislature is entertaining a bill that would establish a civil registry of child sexual abusers.

A recent Missouri Supreme Court decision will require that sex offenders convicted of crimes prior to 1995 be removed from the sex offender registry. Read the story

The online Missouri Death Certificates index covers 1910-1955.

The index can be searched by first name and last name, county, and by year and month. Once a name is selected, a digitized image of the original certificate can be retrieved.