Private Investigator Public Records Internet Search Privacy Reporting - PI Buzz

Here’s another example of a dumb criminal with a twist. It appears that two Mississippi men thought they could actually help free their buddy in a Wilkinson County jail using forged court documents with one of the men posing as a private investigator.

Now, the men are facing felony charges after their plan failed. It is alleged in a news report that Demario Walker, 23, of Prentiss told prison personnel Dec. 27 that he was a private investigator and offered a business card as proof. When officials at the prison run by Corrections Corp. of America asked for photo identification, Walker said he had lost it.

Correction officials were also alert to the fact that the two men were driving a 2004 Kia to supposedly transport the prisoner to another facility.

So, now we have to worry about criminals posing as PIs. It seems that everyone wants to become a private investigator. Who’ll be next?

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COURT TV profiles individuals who are passionate about their work, personable, outgoing, and comfortable in front of the camera. They are currently seeking PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS who are actively working on cases and conducting fieldwork. If you are interested, please send in the following materials:

Biography, curriculum vitae, or summary of experience
Photograph of yourself
Videotape (any format) of you describing what you do and one of your most fascinating cases
Do not miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to gain exposure as an authority in your field!

Please send your materials to:
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Please, NO phone calls or emails. A Court TV representative will contact you directly if interested. Materials cannot be returned.

To learn more about Court TV, visit www.courttv.com.

Charleston County, SC - Samuel R. Crain, a South Carolina licensed PI has been charged with stalking and was held on $100,000 bond. Even though private investigators are exempt from laws prohibiting stalking, it doesn’t protect anyone who does it for personal reasons and not as part of a case.

The victim alleges that Crain, 41, was stalking her and that she saw him watching her from a Piggly Wiggly parking lot. After signing a warrant for his arrest, Crain was quickly arrested and taken into custody. Crain is licensed in South Carolina and Georgia. I’m sure there will be more to read about this case.

Podcasts are audio files that you can listen to on your computer or download to a portable audio device. Podcasts can be posted on a blog or website and only require a microphone to produce, which is part of the good and the bad of podcasts. On the good side is a new blog with podcasts from fellow private investigator and PI News Link reader, Scott Stys. The Curbside Investigator is a good example of podcasts as a savvy marketing tool that is also informative and entertaining. And if he adds me to his blogroll I might add him to mine!

The Indiana Legislature is reviewing a proposed bill that would make vital records - birth and death certificates - confidential and open to review only by certain classes of the public. Exceptions would be made for family members, genealogists and journalists - although it’s a questionable policy to give access to a specific segment of the general public, excluding others. The putative motive is to thwart terrorism and identity theft but no study or instance of the use of Indiana death records has linked death records to these activities, according to the report in the IndyStar.

Technorati Tags: indiana, vital+records

The chief judge of Jefferson County, Colorado has closed divorce and probate files to the public because he doesn’t have the staff to institute the Supreme Court directive to remove personal information from the case files.

Other states are redacting personal information in their online property and court databases and the federal courts are requesting that filers remove date of birth and social security number identifiers from electronically filed documents. This is the first instance that I recall (just off the top of my head) where courts are reviewing old case files and altering them for public view.

The framework for this policy was constructed by the Public Access Committee of the Colorado Judicial Department in their document, Public Access to Court Records, issued in 2005.

Technorati Tags: colorado, divorce+records, probate+records

Sometimes you know which airline is best for that trip from here to there. But on those other occasions you may want to compare times, cost and routes of travel at the friendly Dohop.

Dontbuyjunk admonishes you avoid the lower quality electronics for ones that can meet your needs and budget. The site offers a comparison feature and links you to reviews of specific products at the widely read sites you would go to anyway but would waste a lot of time finding.

Ventura County, California joins the increasing collection of public agencies that are using an untested loophole in the California Public Records Act to charge the document requester for staff time.

Although the California Public Records Act clearly states that public records should be made “promptly available to any person upon payment of fees covering direct costs of duplication, or a statutory fee if applicable,” Ventura County has latched onto the “statutory fee” angle as a way to expand what they can charge for public documents.

The author goes on to give an example of how these costs (staff time charged at $65.64/hour) compromises the spirit and the letter of the law that is intended to increase citizen access to their government.

UPDATE: The arbitrariness of the imposed fee is still in effect even though the county now claims that the fee charged recently to the Ventura County Star was a mistake.

Technorati Tags: california, public+records, ventura+county

PI News Link previously reported on the Tennessee online database of convicted meth sellers and forecast a trend toward more criminal information and tools for manipulating that data appearing on the Internet. The pace is increasing. Illinois is considering a proposal to make the identities of those convicted of domestic violence available on the Internet. Most of us are now familiar with the government-operated national sex offender database, which combined with the Google open source mapping utility has spawned the site mapsexoffenders.com. I amuse myself with thoughts of future maps on which we can simultaneously plot the residential addresses of corporate criminals and politicians. How far apart are they?

At the same time that all this Internet snooping has expanded Illinois has made it possible for some convicted of crimes to have their records sealed. It’s a mixed up crazy world…

Technorati Tags: illinois, domestic+violence

If you’re a frequent visitor to the free online death index sites you might appreciate having a CD of the Social Security Death Index, especially if it only costs $6! This software company is offering the SSDI [dates of death are only through 1999] and a place name finder, each for the shipping cost, through February.

Technorati Tags: social+security, vital+records

The Recorder of Deeds for Christian County, Missouri now has an online index of land records, marriage, tax liens and UCC filings, from 1994 through August 2005. [Username/password are both "public"]

Technorati Tags: missouri, christian+county, recorder

The National Center for State Courts has released Future Trends in State Courts 2005, a 147 page document that anyone who interacts with a state court will want to read. Forecasts are floated on the volatile issue of access to public records, technology applications in the courtroom and the impact of economic, social and political developments on the judicial system.

In the section on public and data regulation the report observes:

The balance of privacy and public-access interests is one of the most significant information management issues facing today’s society. Protecting an individual’s right to privacy in the information age is a growing concern for entities such as financial institutions, health-insurance providers, government agencies, and private industry. The frequency of announcements of massive numbers of electronic bank records or credit-card records being stolen creates general unease among financially responsible citizens.

The prediction is for a continuing tension between the individual right to privacy and the mandate of government transparency.

The battle between institutional efforts to protect the personal information of their clientele and the ingenuity of those who seek the sensitive data for dishonest endeavors will continue to escalate.

For institutions like courts that are mandated to keep their records public, the challenge will be one of respecting their obligation to allow public access to their records while concealing potentially harmful data that could fall into unscrupulous hands.

Although keeping public records accessible will probably triumph over arguments to the contrary (especially as electronic tools make some records even more accessible), public agencies will continue to reexamine the more fundamental question of what information belongs in a public record.

Courts have taken various positions on what personal information is confidential. Some of the actions courts have taken or may implement are removing “…Social Security numbers, names of minor children, financial account numbers, and dates of birth…”. Courts are “…blanking out the first five digits of a Social Security number, referring to minor children by initials only, deleting all financial account numbers, and revealing only the year of birth. Courts are also becoming more sensitive to and sophisticated in protecting records against damage and tampering.”

Technorati Tags: state+courts, public+records
Blogs that cite this post: Legal Dockets

The cover of identity theft and the proliferation of rogue Internet vendors cavalierly selling personal information, including motor vehicle and driver license records, has prompted the Minnesota Attorney General to request that the Department of Public Safety cease its sale of driver’s license data to commercial companies.

Technorati Tags: minnesota, driver+license

Criminal trials must be open to the public “where the child is accused of conduct which, if committed by an adult, would be considered a Class A or B felony”, according to a recent ruling by the Missouri Supreme Court.

Technorati Tags: missouri, juvenile+records

One of my faithful tipsters, who sends me her Internet finds (probably even more frequently than she reads mine) recommends this state by state listing of Workers’ Compensation government sites. The directory includes links to each states various regulatory and enforcement agencies for labor and employment and workers’ compensation.

Technorati Tags: workers’+compensation

The Arizona Commission on Judicial Conduct will now add dismissed complaints and minor sanctions against judges to their online site after March 2006. Serious sanctions were considered a public record prior to the new guidelines issued by the Arizona Supreme Court.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona+judiciary

New Hampshire news organizations were successful in their challenge to a 2004 state law that would have made financial information in divorce files confidential. The state Supreme Court overturned a lower court that placed the primacy of individual privacy above the public’s right to be informed of court proceedings. Financial affidavits can still be sealed if “the party opposing disclosure of the document demonstrate that there is a sufficiently compelling reason that would justify preventing public access to that document.” The restrictive state law was instituted at the behest of Congressman Charles Douglas after his divorce.

Articles: Associated Press
Technorati Tags: new+hampshire, divorce+records

The Maine Attorney General found that the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP)violated the state’s public records act in refusing to release documents from meetings with the Rumford Paper Company. The agency entered into an agreement with Rumford in which the company kept all documents, as a means of circumventing release as a public record. Rumford eventually released some documents but acknowledged destroying others. The head of DEP was forced to resign.

Technorati Tags: public+records, maine

In my daily tour of the Internet I’ve been noticing a consolidation of public records search sites, which seem to be getting gobbled up by the database aggregator Intelius. This company’s primary business targets the consumer who makes the infrequent purchase of a people finder profile. Perhaps it’s my imagination but it seems as if Intelius is acquiring additional sites, based on looking at their interface and the link to the Intelius database.

Publicrecordfinder claims, to be the “Largest Public Records Directory”, which sounds strangely similar to SearchSystems.net, which is probably the oldest public records directory on the Internet, and collects links to government-operated online databases of public record indexes and documents. SearchSystems is the brainchild of Tim Koster, who is still the owner, and bills itself as the “Largest Free Public Records Directory.” I found most of the listed sites on the Publicrecordfinder site (I searched the Missouri page.) were dead links. The rest were a mixture of Intelius fee searches, government home pages and some government database indexes.

“The World’s Largest Directory of Internet Addresses” (iaf.net) is another Intelius linked site.

All these hyperbolical declarations of “the largest” got me wondering which other sites are making similar claims. I formulated an Internet search: allintitle: “world’s largest * directory”, and discovered “the world’s largest arabic sex directory,” which apparently refers to the gender of baby naming.

Technorati Tags: public+records, directories

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, responding to the recommendation of a state task force, has created a Meth Offender Registry Database. Search by name or by all offenders within a county. Results return the name, offense and date of conviction.

Technorati Tags: offender+registries, tennessee

The various free news providers that draw from many original sources -Google News or Yahoo! News- enable searches by keywords appearing at a specific url, and by keywords in news within a geographical region. The unique advantage offered by these sites is not just the ability to search many sources at once, but to do it on an ongoing basis, without having to reenter the search terms. You can add or remove your search terms at anytime; view the results at the search engine webpage, in your email or in a newsreader.

Sometimes you may want to search a personal name, company or topic limited to a geographical region. If you wanted to identify current crime blotter reports in New York newspapers your Google News or Yahoo! News search engine will formulate a request for the exact term “police reports” in the article text of New York newspapers: allintext: “police records” location:ny. Then save the search to “alerts” to receive daily updates.

If you want to search particular news sites, including ones that aren’t in the Google or Yahoo news search, go to your search engine “alerts” page. Add a search alert for “police reports” at the site, Great Neck Record, in this form:
“police report” site:http://www.antonnews.com/greatneckrecord/

Topix.net aggregates news from multiple sources, is keyword searchable, with results updated to your newsfeed reader. Limit local results to a city or zip code.

Create Google Alerts Yahoo! Alerts

Technorati Tags: local+search, news

The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL), a government body I haven’t given much thought to, has a quick reference to states that have adopted various recommendations on changes to their laws to create uniformity across all states. This organization of lawyers and legislators “supports the federal system and facilitates the movement of individuals and the business of organizations with rules that are consistent from state to state. ”

Select legislation from the drop-down menu to find the states that have adopted it and the summary language with bill tracking. For example, UNIFORM CHILD WITNESS TESTIMONY BY ALTERNATIVE METHODS ACT (2002) has been adopted by Idaho, Nevada and Oklahoma.

There is no site search engine so you can either search for all legislation by state or by the particular name of the legislation.

Technorati Tags: state+legislation

A state-by-state chart showing each states’ electronic surveillance laws, with links to the code sections, addresses both wiretapping and eavesdropping regulations, can be found at the National Conference of State Legislatures website. [Mentioned at Librarians' Internet Index.] In an earlier PI News Link posting, I wrote about the legality of recording telephone conversations.

Technorati Tags: electronic+surveillance

I may just be imagining this, since I don’t often use the Sacramento County, California online criminal court index, but the details provided on criminal index search results seems to have expanded. And the site has announced that something (unspecified) is new! Enter a last name, first initial, or a case number to get filing information and disposition.

Technorati Tags: criminal+index, sacramento

I’m a big fan of Steve Morse’s advanced Social Security Death Index, one of the many search tools that he’s crafted and made available. Morse has added two new tweaks to other databases that increase their functionality. One he calls a birthday finder, the other helps to fill out a partial date of birth. The date of birth finder, which searches the privateeye.com database (the interface looks like Intelius or Zabasearch), allows for a first name only search. It also returns associates. [Reported by Genealogy and How]

Morse describes just how his search tool revs up the databases:

When using the One-Step form, the birthdates of the people found are displayed on the results page. When using the privateeye.com site directly, the results sent back include the birthdates but these dates are not displayed.

From the One-Step form you can search on just the year of birth and leave the month and day blank. If you do this from the privateeye.com site directly, you will get no results.

Technorati Tags: steve+morse,