Private Investigator Blog

The Federal government may, once again, reach out to private companies — ChoicePoint and LexisNexis, the large data brokers, to verify personal information that the government needs but doesn’t have the means to gather. While the data brokers are under...
Read more »

Consumer Reports has digested the many health information sites on the Internet and reduced the list to the top 20 reliable...
Read more »

The Motley Fool assesses ChoicePoint’s financials and finds, all in all, the company isn’t doing too bad. Litigation risk certainly exists. Regulatory risk, too. But I’d submit that any company that can, in the face of such troubles, still produce...
Read more »

Catch the webcast of the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce hearing, Data Security: The Discussion Draft of Data Protection Legislation, this Thursday at 10am. I assume that’s D.C. time. The Washington-centric folks don’t say. The Hearing web page...
Read more »

It seems that everytime EPIC concocts a medicinal potion to treat threats to privacy there is a legislator standing by to ensure that it is broadly disseminated. The current danger: online sales of cell phone call logs. Charles Schumer is...
Read more »

Utah’s Government Records Access Management Task Force (GRAMA) is discovering the tortuous variables presented in redacting information from public records. The task force is conducting a series of meetings. The issues are reported in this...
Read more »

If you read your Ohio Public Records Act handbook, which I reported on here, you might have discovered that Ohio police officer personnel files are available. The News-Herald reports on the various ways police departments organize their...
Read more »

We have the beginnings of a government sponsored site that links to all the state sex offender registries. The activity level has been so great at http://www.nsopr.gov/ that the server has been down, making the site inaccessible. Remember the long...
Read more »

Robert Scott, of The Investigator’s Little Black Book, has tossed his hat into the ring of SSN validators, launching SSNValidator, still in beta mode. Like the several other online validator services, Scott offers a few searches for free, then you...
Read more »

Discrepancies between county and state sex offender registries may be more pronounced than in other criminal indexes, as demonstrated in this example in Missouri. One private site that was plotting sex offender addresses on Google Maps ceased operating because 2/3...
Read more »