Pillbox - Identify an unknown pill
Visual association of an unknown pill with its type.
100 Search Engines in 100 Minutes
"‘100 Search Engines in 100 Minutes’"
yoName - People Search. Search for people across social networks, blogs and more.
"Searching within over 4,500 broadcast media, newspapers, & national magazine websites:"
The rest of my favorite links are here.
Criminal Case Number Index Search - Santa Clara County Superior Court
"Criminal Case Number Search Select one of three options for searching the five-year criminal index."
The County of Santa Clara - The County of Santa Clara
"To obtain inmate booking information you must provide the Person File Number (PFN) or Booking Number (CEN), or Name, and Date of Birth or Booking Date of the inmate."
California Codes.
"How to Cite Twitter and Facebook, Part II: Reference List Entries and In-Text Citations "
"Find people in the U.S. Military "
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
How To Research A Legal Problem: A guide for non attorneys
This guide is intended to help a person with a legal problem find legal rules that can resolve or prevent conflict. It is most useful to work through the steps and sources in the order given.
Oregon Department of Justice - Public Records and Meetings Manual
Every two years, following adjournment of regular legislative sessions, the Attorney General updates and publishes a Public Records and Meetings Manual. The manual is intended to provide assistance to state agencies, local governments and to the public generally. The following links will direct you to a PDF file containing the 2008 edition of the manual. We are posting this PDF version in order to facilitate public access to the 2008 manual, but the document was initially prepared for print publication. If you are a public employee or board member using the manual for public business, or if you are using the manual in connection with for-profit activity, we ask that you purchase a print version of the manual if you have not already done so. Instructions for purchasing a print version of the manual appear below."
"Online and Wired for Justice: Why Jurors Turn to the Internet"
Analysis of juror behavior & the responses of the court system. Has an extensive list of references.
How to Turn Twitter Into Your One-Stop Lifestream
"How to Turn Twitter Into Your One-Stop Lifestream"
"To find the local law enforcement office with a Community Oriented Notification website that supports address lookups and active email alerts select the appropriate state and county. If you do not find a local office that makes sex offender information available on line with address search capability and email alerts designed to send you an email when a registered sex offender moves within your safety radial, please use the "Contact Us" so we can work with the office to make services available. "
Searchzooka - Never type the same search twice
Filter search engine results.
Search environmental health, chemicals, toxicology databases by keywords.
List of live police scanner feeds by state.
Live Police, Fire, and EMS Scanners on RadioReference.com
Listen to fire, law enforcement and medical response scanner frequencies online.
Pay traffic citations
Fresno County Pay Traffic Fines Online
Pay Traffic Fines Online
"pticket.com provides information about Citations in various cities, colleges and universities. In many cases, you are also able to pay your Citation online with a credit card."
Alameda County Traffic Citation - Moving Violations
Enter a Docket or Citation Number"
With Citation Number, License Plate Number and City Code view red light violation photo.
San Mateo Traffic Citation Search
Search citations by name with DOB (get DL #) or by DL #. Get citation #, reason, payment, vehicle registration address.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
See privacy inks: http://is.gd/3nWq5Who would have thought that creating a fake profile on MySpace (a violation of their user agreement) could lead to a criminal conviction? The recent verdict in the case of Lori Drew concluded that she was guilty of computer fraud for doing just that. Of course the verdict was influenced by the belief that the email messages sent under the false identity contributed to a girl’s suicide, and certainly gave the impetus for the criminal charge.
Let this be a warning to information researchers and investigators who are collecting data on subjects through their social networking sites.
As part of my investigations I do passive information gathering on the Internet, like monitoring MySpace sites. Other investigators have asked me if they should create a profile to become a “friend” of someone who has a private MySpace page in order to get access to the full site. Before you do it you better be tech savvy so you can cover your footsteps.
Like with any other investigative action keep in mind: Is this legal and ethical? How would it be perceived by a jury? Will this be detrimental to the overall case? Are there unintended consequences that may reflect badly on my client?
I did have one techie admit that he learned something new at the presentation I did for the Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyers Association. Their Sunny Climate Seminar is held every year in Hawaii, very painful…
Almost as soon as I minted my PowerPoint, So You Think You Know Google? (see an edited version), Google released design changes to Google Maps and added a new feature, SearchWiki, to Web search. SearchWiki — a search results comment feature that can be public or private — is potentially an investigative tool to see what people are saying about incidents and people and companies in the news. But SearchWiki may die before much of a database of comments develops because the addition has been fairly negatively received. Read more about this at Internet News. In a trial search example, enter “searchwiki” in the Google search box then scroll to the bottom of the search results page. Click on “All notes for this SearchWiki” and start reading the comments by selecting the link under the URL of each search result.
There are other blogs that are featuring screenshots and discussing all the new features on Google Maps Street View, but one feature improvement stood out to me — the revamped 360 degree rotate. Now, in the Street View image just hold your mouse button on the “N” on the circular dial as you move around the circle to get smoother, more incremental views of the street scene. An addition that I’ve long wished for has been added, although it’s not as seamless as the new panorama rotate, the “look up”/”look down” function. Remember zooming to get a good shot of a street address only to have it disappear from view? Now you can zoom, then elevate or lower the view for the enjoyment of a tall building (but no simulated scaling of the building) or to get a closer glance at the part of the frame that disappeared in the older Street View version.
One last Google note for those of you who use gmail. You no longer need fear a panic attack on the discovery that your email account has been swallowed by the cybermonster. Thanks to Inter Alia for the pointer to Gmail Backup.
If you subscribe to PI buzz Alert you may have seen the link I included to UCrime, a crime information mapping site of recent crime incidents at universities. Search by address or date (2008 only) to see reported crimes plotted on a map, with icons distinguishing the type of incident. No names are listed and it’s not clear what the source is for the data, but this may still be useful if you need a snapshot of the criminal activity on any one of about 100 schools.
A site that may be an sister site, SpotCrime provides the same type of interactive mapping for cities and counties.
There are also crime logs and mapping of crimes at the Web sites of universities, university public safety departments and newspapers. The Morehead State University Police Web site has logs of incidents to 2004. This Texas college newspaper has put together a map of campus crimes, while this major daily paper only shows crimes perpetrated in the surrounding community in which students of the University at Albany were involved. A site calling itself UMichCrime gets data from the University of Michigan Department of Public Safety then plots it on a map. Most of the data on these sites are not retained for more than a few years; the Case Western Reserve crime mapping is an exception, extending to 2000. The Boulder Police Department at the University of Colorado plots recent crime incidents on an interactive map.
Find more campus crime maps searching for the words or phrases in the URL: crimemap, map or crime. If you don’t have a specific school in mind try variations on a search query: inurl:crimemap site:edu or campus inurl:map intitle:crime.
What are the top 10 searches in the Google search engine of interest to private investigators? The new Google product, Google Insights, is a Web site optimization tool, or just an amusing time-waster, depending on your inclination.
I searched the phrase “find my”, which returned top searches, listing, “find my ip” and “find my way” — humm, either part of a song or someone who’s lost? It also gave me related terms and “rising searches”, number 6 being “find a person”. Each phrase is assigned a value, 1 to 100, the higher number correlates with more search queries. See the volume plotted on a graph, mapped by region or in a state list. The search can be filtered by state, category or specific dates. Interesting factoid: the number of queries with the phrase “find a person” has declined since 2004.
Search terms related to find a person:
Top searches
1. find people 100
2. person search 85
3. find phone number 80
4. find address 80
5. find someone 30
6. locate a person 20
7. find an address 20
Continue to drill through related terms to phrase searches that are on the uptick, such as “people finders“.
I don’t regularly check the currency of the links in prior postings, but you may have realized that many links on the Internet are good one day and dead the next. One way to find the new page is to backspace to the URL, deleting the subdirectories. Click on this link to see what I mean by an error message. If you backspace to just http://www.indystar.com, you’ll get to the site’s home page. Once you get to the home page search for a tab or drop-down menu related to the content. At the IndyStar site I was looking for the database of live police calls, which in the tabs at the top of the page is “Data Central”, under the “News” tab, and in the body of the Home page is linked to from “More databases.” Confusing, eh?
Visually scan the home page for an icon related to the topic of the former page. Newspaper public records and Sheriff departments “Most Wanted” and “Current Inmates” databases are often only displayed with a button link. The link to the sitemap, a visual representation or topical list of the pages at that Web site is usually found at the top or very bottom of the page, if it’s there at all. As a last resort, use the site’s search engine engine. Usually you’ll do better with a decently formulated search query at Google or Yahoo!. The link to the IndyStar Data Central calls for service to police and fire was the second result in this fairly lame search construction. Often this is good enough to quickly get you to your destination.
How do you find the corrected link after getting an error message page?
I’ve pointed to this collection of free people finding and genealogy tools before. The site wizard, Steve Morse, has added a Social Security number decoder for matching the state of issuance with the number range. It’s a handy place to go when you need to do a quick check.
A pair of computer science students are building the California Newspaper Project, an early stage venture to create a database to search and view entries in historical newspapers. Many other fee-based products, such as NewspaperArchive.com and WorldVitalRecords.com, have traveled down this path. Currently, the San Francisco Call is the only paper indexed. Read more about the development and the aim of this project. State and university archives, which collect historical materials, including newspapers, are listed in this Columbia University assembled subject guide.
There’s a flood of search engines that query the social networking sites only, which may be helpful for finding a site that you already know about, but they won’t snare many sites that you’ll find through a major search engine. I’ve been listing these in my PI buzz Alert newsletter (sign up by selecting the “Subscribe” button in the right sidebar) as they come online. Formulate different queries for a known site through the various search engines to get a sense for how they work and their effectiveness. PeekYou is still in a test mode. Enter a user name as it appears at the social networking site, or a first name and location at AfterVote to retrieve matches at Web sites and social media sites. Read/WriteWeb drew up a list of alternative search engines earlier this year.
The folks at Oakland Crimespotting have elegantly rendered the crime data (if such attributes can be applied to crime) from the Oakland, California CrimeView, operated by the Oakland Police Department.
The Web page opens with crime-specific color coded icons placed at the crime sites on an interactive map. Pan in all directions to easily view the types of reported criminal activity throughout Oakland. Hover over the icon to get a popup listing the date, time and type of crime, and a hypelink report number that opens a larger view of the selected crime area. Receive new crime reports by email or RSS.
The Oakland government CrimeView site takes you through a 5-part process before you get to the crime map. If you want to search by address or intersection and you don’t know where those are on the map, the Oakland government site may be a better starting point. I wrote about this site and other crime mapping links last year. Since then, the LA Times has developed a Homicide Map for Los Angeles.
I spend much of each work day developing profiles of people and companies through Internet research. Private investigators aren’t usually just looking for a specific piece of information but everything that is in the public sphere. In this case, on the Internet. One of the means of getting access to the chaotic collection of information is search engines. Intelligent use of search engines can make the difference between a key discovery and merely being buried by too many irrelevant search results. A recent study (lower right corner of Web page) reiterates previous ones that reveal the slight overlap of search results between the different search engines. Here are some of the findings:
* On average, 69.6 percent of Google first page search results were unique to Google.
* On average, 79.4 percent of Yahoo! first page search results were unique to Yahoo!
* On average, 80.1 percent of Live first page search results were unique to Live.
* On average, 75.0 percent Ask first page search results were unique to Ask. [Reported in SearchEngineLand via Internet News ]
Those are the top 4 search engines. I have about 30 search engines - crawling the general Internet, social networking sites, blogs and group chat activity - that I use regularly for just about every research project. In my experience, I almost always find unique and valuable information through this expansive approach.
Learn more about advanced search queries in this slideshow. And closely clutch this guide.
Applying advanced search queries and “out-of-the-box” approaches to social networking sites isn’t helpful for just uncovering youth sites but also professional ones. Most business professionals are now using social networking sites to make connections. If you’re in California this September come to the presentation Carole Levitt and I will be doing on this topic at the State Bar of California Annual Meeting.
