The rest of my favorite links are here.

The rest of my favorite links are here.

The rest of my favorite links are here.

Monterey County, California has a traffic citation database separate from the court case traffic index that you can search by name and date of birth. Supply the driver license number to check the traffic ticket payment system for violations and the date when traffic school was completed.

Search by name with a date of birth at the San Mateo County site to locate active citations.

A jurisdiction’s traffic citation payment site may require a case docket number or a citation number and some government agencies contract with commercial payment services, which have varying field input requirements. The government agencies may specify that citation information can only be retrieved with a citation number. But Fresno State, for example, allows a search by license plate number.

Another commercial site has the option of finding a citation by vehicle plate and state.

Subscribe to links to research sources and new public records sites, delivered by RSS or viewed through your Twitter application at: http://twitter.com/PIbuzz.

The rest of my favorite links are here.

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

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

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

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

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.

Much of the discussion concerned access to profile content, - the difference between civil and criminal (where there’s the familiar prosecution/defense imbalance) cases - whether certain information should be private even if it can be viewed by unintended parties. For example, should employers be able to view deleted personal information? No one mentioned the issue of whether schools have a legal right to compel students to turn over their user names/passwords (See: “Area School Wants Access To Students’ Social Networking”). There may be instances when a legal requirement for disclosure would apply. Lauren Gelman, Executive Director, Stanford Law, Center for Internet and Society, raised the question of whether evidence in the online sites could be used, say, in divorce cases, to support evidence gathered by other means. The Deputy General Counsel for Facebook took the position that user’s profile content is private, begging the audience to sue the company to settle issues of access. Yeah, the big brother of the moment IS laughing.

Bill Gallagher, a criminal defense attorney, noted that a circumvention of the Facebook corporate roadblock would be to get witnesses to bring to court copies of their social network profiles. But it’s impossible to get a judge to compel a witness to do so. He added that defense attorneys have to get a cooperative prosecutor to issue a subpoena in order to get access to a social network profile. Life is very different for government attorneys and law enforcement…

But this was an environment in which those who might be adversaries outside the ivory walls engaged in friendly disagreements, more in the form of musings than hard-line positions. Perhaps this was, in part, due to the unsettled nature of the law and the do’s, don’ts and can’ts of social networking.

Paul Ohm was on the panel, “The Law and Ethics of Covert or Deceptive Data-Gathering”, proposing that some content — photos and status updates — should be sealed from view, treated differently than other types of documentary evidence because it’s transient, akin to a passing comment over the water-cooler. Lauren Gelman inquired whether user profile content was different in kind from other types of memorializing due to the privacy restrictions that the account holder sets. She added that the online content has a long searchable life, which also gives it a unique nature. And who decides what is private? As Paul Ohm rightly pointed out, commercial entities are the holders of that power.

Speakers on the panel, “Regulating Crime in the Cloud: Policing Unlawful Behavior on Social Networks”, discussed release of email, who should interpret the meaning of an online comment or image, weighting the probative value vs. the harm caused. A passing observation by Judge Kurt Kumli, Santa Clara County California Superior Court, caught my attention. (Correct me if I’m wrong!) In a domestic violence matter, a defendant can “follow” the victim on her Facebook site without violating a protective order.

In the spirit of academic engagement (unlike government, that must be dragged, kicking and screaming), all of the conference presentations were recorded and will be available on the website.

In the meantime, take a look at this guide to social networking research that was prepared by the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic in response to a request from the Santa Clara Public Defender: Handbook on Conducting Research on Social-Networking Websites in California.

Cases, news reports, books, law journal articles and opinions are noted in the resources section of the website and the Case Studies are also posted. The mp3 files of all the panels, the audience comments and questions and the Keynote Address (by John Carlin, Chief of Staff and Senior Counsel to the Director of the F.B.I.) should be available this week.

UPDATE (10/30/09): The mp3 audio files are at the conference site.

Read Donna Seyle’s conference review, The Legal Dilemmas of Social Networking, Part 1

A review from the non-profit sector is here.

1. “Ultimate News Database” - infoPig (http://www.infopig.com)
View news on designated topics, by major news outlets or related to geographical regions. You can also construct queries of keywords and receive those in your newsreader.

2. “Personalized News Aggregator” - Meehive (http://www.meehive.com)
Build a newspaper style webpage with custom keywords. No RSS or email export. Invite others to view your page at Meehive or on your social network.

3. “Keyword-Based RSS Feed Generator” - Kebberfegg (http://www.researchbuzz.org/tools/kebberfegg.pl)
Send personalized keyword searches to your newsreader. Search the web, news, blogs and more. The news sources and aggregators identified are: BBC, NewsisFree, FeedsFarm, Google News, IceRocket News, NewsTrove News, RocketNews, Topix.net, FindArticles, Wired, Findory, Yahoo News, MSN News, Moreover, Go Articles, Highbeam.

4. “Most comprehensive index of popularly tracked categories” - Trackle (http://www.trackle.com)
Receive keyword matches on the web, in your email or by RSS. Select the “News and Politics” category to query headline, local, global and topical news sources.

5. USNPL Newspaper Search - (http://is.gd/4eoOV)
Formulate advanced search queries, just as you would at a major search engine, to retrieve results from all newspapers at this site. There’s no RSS feature.

6. “A Top 10 online newspaper destination” - Topix (http://topix.net)
There doesn’t seem to be a convenient RSS feed, so you’ll have to make your own. Create your RSS feed for this site with the URL:

http://www.topix.net/search/article?xml=1&q=%22keyword%22
Replace the term “keyword” with your word or phrase and paste the URL in your newsreader.

7. Real-Time conversation monitoring - Twitter (http://twitter.com)
Select users to follow, or track mentions of your keywords and receive updates by RSS. Other applications offer alternative ways of viewing results and more rapid returns than email, if you’re monitoring in the application. See Monitter (http://www.monitter.com) and TweetDeck (http://tweetdeck.com). These services use the Twitter search engine but the Twitter search (http://search.twitter.com) is more robust, and that’s also viewable in your newsreader. But this searches the postings not the Bio or Name fields. For that see Using Google’s New Features to Get Twitter Information (http://is.gd/4eo3F).

There are many Internet sites for identifying current last names of women — searching by first name only — for whom the investigator may only have a birth name or former married name. Each site returns different results so you’ll want to use more than one, if at first you don’t find what you’re looking for.

At the site, classmates.com, I performed a similar search to the one I did in tip #1, except that there’s no field to restrict the results by year of birth or full birthdate. In that case, I entered just the first name and a state. The results give last names and birth names and the name of the school with the attendance years. You can use this to narrow the birth year. The tip #1 search site returned 17 matches. I supplied first name, age and state. Classmates returned 67 matches associated with first name and state. Very few of these matched the age of the subject, based on the listed graduation years. It’s a limited source but still supplements other sites.

Do you have a favorite website or database that allows searching by first name?

Use the free portion of a people finder site that allows you to search by first name and date of birth. But you also have to use a workaround on sites that require a last name to perform the search. This involves the handy wildcard. In this case, we’ll apply the asterisk.

At the site peoplefinders.com enter a first name in that field and an asterisk (*) in the last name field. Add date of birth or year of birth. This will work until the search interface is changed — which may happen just as soon as the powers that be see this tip!

That’s tip #1 in Finding, Skip Tracing and Locating Women. Do you know of other sites where a skip trace by first name can be performed?