Private Investigator Public Records Internet Search Privacy Reporting – PI Buzz

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.

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 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?

Computer Forensic professionals are quickly finding out that several states are now requiring them to be licensed as private investigators.

A recent article in Baseline Magazine details how legislators in South Carolina have introduced pending legislation where “digital forensic evidence gathered for use in a court in this state must be collected by a person with a PI license or through a PI licensed agency.”

The Texas Private Security Board recently made a ruling regarding the licensing regulations which effect computer security consultants and computer forensic examiners. They felt that it is important that these computer related practitioners, as well as the entities hiring their services, are familiar with the licensing regulations, as violations carry steep financial and legal penalties.

There is no doubt that these regulations will cause computer forensic experts to create strategic business alliances with private investigators to insure that evidence they collect is not thrown out of court over licensing issues.

What do you think about this? Should computer forensic experts be required to have a PI license? Do private investigators have the necessary training and expertise to conduct computer forensic examinations?

Search the online records of disciplinary actions from 2000 to 2007 for funeral homes and funeral practitioners at the Maine Board of Funeral Service. Use this advanced search query at the Google search engine. In this example, I’ve searched the name “Fernald”. Note the Web address in the search bar.

Use the same Google search format to identify Pennsylvania professional license disciplinary actions, including for funeral directors and funeral homes, from 1999 to 2007.

The Oregon Mortuary and Cemetery Board has images of Notice of Proposed Disciplinary Action and Consent Order for cases filed from 2005 to 2007.

The Texas Funeral Service Commission has a one page list of disciplinary actions taken against licensees since September 2006. The record has a name, violation, action taken and date.

This document has hyperlinks to all the state funeral regulatory boards.

The California Supreme Court seems to be leaning toward the interpretation of state law granting the public access to the names and salaries of government employees, including police officers. A ruling is expected within 3 months. A favorable ruling for the newspapers that filed the lawsuits could help private investigators in police misconduct cases track the employment of officers across departments.

The Computer Services Bureau of the California Police Officers Standards and Training (POST) Commission maintains a database of peace officer records to track employment training.

California criminal defense attorneys and investigators, and crime reporters will want to consult the 2007 Legal Update, a 150 page guide to legislation, case law and Attorney General Opinions enacted in the past year related to law enforcement.

Idaho has received a grant to expand its victim notification service (VINE) beyond the state prison system to its county jails. The complete network should be operational by next year.

Photos for inmates at the Utah County, Utah jail are back online after being removed because someone downloaded a bunch of photos and posted them to another site. To their credit, the County Attorney and Sheriff emerged from their huddle with a wise decision: fix the technological problem and get the public records back online.

Jennifer LaFleur discusses some of the troubling legislation that passed and failed in Texas recently, including the closure of the concealed gun registrations database to public inspection.

The Arizona Supreme Court ruled that the courts, not government entities determine which emails generated by agencies are public records. Calaveras County, California, seems to be taking a serious look at its electronic records storage policy. Check out the Federal Judicial Center “Links” page for electronic discovery resources.

Illinois has unveiled its Illinois Child Murderer and Violent Offender Against Youth Registry.

Search by name, city, zip code, county or offender status. Perhaps the kinks aren’t worked out, but I couldn’t get search results by any criteria. You can also map offenders, but only if you know the street address and zip code. Here’s what the database covers.

The CMVOY registry contains individuals convicted of specific crimes in which the victim was a minor, but the crime was not sexually motivated. The crimes – as defined by HB 4193, signed by Governor Blagojevich on June 27, 2006 – include kidnapping, aggravated kidnapping, unlawful restraint, aggravated unlawful restraint, and any attempt to commit any of these offenses when the victim is under 18 years of age and when the defendant is not a parent of the victim. Other offenses include forcible detention, child abduction or murder when the victim was a person under 18 years of age and the defendant was at least 17 years of age.

A Santa Clara County, California Superior Court judged has ordered the county to make its GIS property parcel mapping database available to the public at minimal cost. The California First Amendment Coalition took the county to court, upending the government’s myriad excuses for keeping the map data out of public reach. Reported by AP

A new Texas Administrative Rule institutes a prohibition in the recording of personal information by notary publics.

There’s been much debate in legislatures and government administration about which public records should be sealed. The Texas legislature is considering whether to withhold search warrant affidavits for 60 days from public view. The Nevada Legislature failed to set guidelines or restrict judges from sealing court records and now the state Supreme Court may establish its own requirements.

Iowa State regulatory boards that license professionals such as doctors, nurses, dentists and psychologists will be required to release the record of formal charges against medical professionals that stem from patient complaints.

Philadelphia will be the first region in Pennsylvania to implement an automated inmate release telephone notification. The service, which just covers local jails, will be available to anyone, not just crime victims, when it goes into operation in June 2007. The Statewide Automated Victim Information and Notification (SAVIN) alert program will add the other counties over the next 18 months, and may later add state inmates.

The Houston Independent School District is the most recent Texas school district to post its payments to vendors online. Expenses can be identified by vendor but not by type of expenditure. Other districts have some payment information online as well.

A law under consideration in the Nevada legislature would prevent sealing of court cases involving high-profile litigants, which the judges had been doing, according to a survey by the Nevada Appeal.

The Texas Secretary of State Athlete Agent search has been added to the other business activity registration database searches at the Texas SOS Web site. The other types of entities that can be searched by name or business name are: Debt Collector Bonds, Health Spas, Public Safety Solicitations, Telephone Solicitors, Veterans Solicitations and Notary Public.

Search by partial first or last name, business name, address or telephone number.

A Wisconsin federal jury concluded that a police officer unlawfully disclosed a woman’s address to her ex husband, a violation of the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act. An exception is made for the service of legal papers, which was a ruse used by the ex husband, who was subject to a restraining order, which the police officer neglected to see when he checked a court index. The case has had a chilling effect on other police departments, one of which is no longer allowing the public to view traffic violation citations.

The Texas House passed HB 2061, Relating to the acquisition or disclosure of the social security number of a living person by a governmental body, including by a district or county clerk, which allows county clerks to release documents that have social security numbers on them.

The Senate State Affairs Committee hearing on this Bill is taking place Monday, March 12. County clerks and real estate title company representatives are speaking in support of the Bill and the recording of only the last 4 digits of the social security number on all documents, which are usually only on federal tax liens and child support tax liens. One clerk has stated that the new federal tax liens only contain the last 4 numbers. Several clerks have pointed out that they don’t have the resources to redact SSNs or to digitize records.

The urgent legislation was necessary because of the disruption to government activity brought about by the recent opinion by the Texas Attorney General. The bill also allows clerks to redact social security numbers, when requested. One clerk said “she plans on requiring a notary public’s seal on all redaction requests submitted to her office.” Will the redaction requests be released as a public record, with the social security number redacted, of course?

Also reported at: Bizjournals, TVC Alert

The Idaho State Death Index has been updated to include an additional 3 years. Coverage now runs from 1911-1956.

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 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.

A federal bill to establish a nationwide drug dealers registry has been referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary. HR 304, quaintly entitled, Clean Town Act of 2007, if enacted, would set forth “guidelines and incentives for States to establish criminal drug dealer registries and to require the Attorney General to establish a national criminal drug dealer registry and notification program…” From the point of view of a private investigator this would be another research tool, but for the criminally charged it’s another nudge toward a public national criminal offender database.

Other introduced federal legislation would expand on the recently enacted Telephone Records and Privacy Act of 2006. S.92, Protecting Consumer Phone Records Act would make it unlawful to “acquire or use the customer proprietary network information of another person without that person’s affirmative written consent…”

Continuing on the consumer privacy theme Senator Feinstein has submitted two bills related to the release of personal information. S. 238, concerns the misuse of Social Security numbers; S. 239 would “require Federal agencies, and persons engaged in interstate commerce, in possession of data containing sensitive personally identifiable information, to disclose any breach of such information.” Text is not yet available for either measure.

The Texas legislature is entertaining a number of bills that could impact private investigators. SB 123 would block release of certain personal information on minors; SB 48 would redact social security numbers from county public records; HB 73 prohibits acquisition of telephone records without the subscriber’s permission; HB 87 is similar to a bill private investigators and the motion picture industry defeated in California that would have prevented anyone from acquiring personal information in a business record.

Indiana House Bill 1046 will prohibit “a person from transmitting false or misleading caller ID information through a caller ID service.”

The Del Norte County California Tax Assessor records can be searched by parcel number.

Sometimes public records that are not available at a government site can be found at a free private Web site. Newspapers have gathered records and built searchable databases, as is the case with crime reports in San Antonio, Texas. The Express-News Crimebase can be searched by type of offense, ZIP code, street names, reporting officer or report number.

The Kentucky Court has been mandated to destroy all misdemeanor files older than 5 years. Cases filed before 2001 have already been purged.

The Multnomah County, Oregon Auditor’s Office has released its report, Public Records: Eliminate barriers to citizen access, a brief examination and statistical compilation of the response of county agencies to public record act requests. The Oregonian concludes that the county may be in violation of Oregon’s Public Records Law.

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 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.

Rules proposed to reduce court secrecy

The Florida Bar is recommending statewide rules that would make it harder to seal court records and bar judges from hiding the existence of entire court cases, a process known as super-sealing.

The proposed rules, unanimously approved by the executive committee of the Bar’s board of governors, would impose tough new requirements on those who seek to make civil or criminal court records confidential. ”It’s pretty much of a home run for the advocates of openness,” said Miami First Amendment attorney Tom Julin. “It’s creating very serious hurdles for anyone who wants to seal records.”

As part of the Virtual Neighborhood Border Watch Program, the State of Texas has been testing video surveillance cameras in different environments along the 1240 miles of Texas/Mexico border using the internet to transmit the images.

The San Jose Police Department, in California, is making traffic accident reports available online. The site lists the categories of people to whom the reports can lawfully be released. A last name of the driver or injured party and the report ID number must be provided.

Public reaction to inmate data posted by a Texas county has lead the agency to remove it.

Less than three weeks after information about Tarrant County Jail inmates became available online, county officials agreed Tuesday to cut back on the project because of complaints that photographs and old arrest information should not be so easily accessible to the public.

By now you’re probably aware that there’s no such animal as a thorough court records check, even in an individual county. Why? Because there are hidden dockets that are not accessible to the public and are not recorded in the court index of cases. Also, some records are deemed confidential, not just juvenile matters but divorce and other civil cases.

Take a look at the Pima County, Arizona Confidential Sensitive Data Form. This is the document on which a filer enters all personal and financial information of case parties. It’s then sealed, like closed adoption records, only available by court order. If the filer neglects to put the personal information on the confidential form, the entire document can be sealed. And how likely is it that a judge will expose the file to your light of day? An Arizona attorney discovered that a 1997 divorce file had been sealed. No reason was given. The judge who reveiwed the file in response to the attorney’s request to have it opened, denied access, according to the Tucson Citizen.

Judge John Davis ruled in Pima County Superior Court that, “It is presumed that court records should be open and available to the public.”

But Davis, after inspecting the file, did not order the divorce case opened. He wrote that Kirschner already had obtained the information he needed and there was nothing else of use to him in the file.

“Little or no impact on the public or the public’s broader constitutional rights is involved,” Davis wrote.