Private Investigator News: Ca open records bill will allow same-day access to court records

"A group of press and open government groups in California are backing a court transparency bill recently introduced by state Senator Leland Yee requiring that court administrators give the public and news reporters prompt access to newly filed public documents.

The bill, now pending in the state Senate, seeks to remedy a steady deterioration in press access to California's trial courts. It is backed by the California Newspaper Publishers Association, Courthouse News Service, the First Amendment Coalition and Californians Aware.

"Delays in public access have unfortunately become epidemic," said Yee from San Francisco. "SB 326 will help rekindle some light on the actions of courts and lawsuits that greatly affect the public.""
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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Private Investigator News: Oregon judge rules recorded phone calls are a public record

"Judge John McCormick issued a judgment on March 25 regarding the public records case involving Councilor Ray Weldon and the city of Lebanon and its manager, John Hitt.

McCormick ruled that a recorded telephone conversation in connection with public business is a public record, agreeing with Weldon.

He added that a city has no obligation to record all telephone conversations, but that “prudent state agencies and public bodies do record and keep a record of all telephone conversations.”"

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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Private Investigator News: Public not taking advantage of open records

"The Bristol Herald Courier reviewed six months of records requests in an effort to see what Bristolians on both sides of the state line hoped to learn about their respective city governments.

The answer? Well, there’s not much curiosity on the part of the people in either city.

Defense attorneys, a Colorado police tactics training company, and even a few public officials have glimpsed into local municipal files. But the average citizen’s thirst for public documents seems almost nonexistent – save for a few police reports on domestic disputes."

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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Private Investigator News: California public university records to become more transparent

"On a 4-1 bipartisan vote, the California Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday approved legislation to bring greater transparency and accountability at California’s public higher education institutions.

SB 8, by Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, would update the California Public Records Act to include auxiliary organizations and foundations that perform government functions at the University of California, California State University, and California’s community colleges.

The bill has overwhelmingly passed the Legislature twice but was vetoed by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, R-Los Angeles."

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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Private Investigator News: Missouri Expands Searchable Campaign Records

"The Missouri Ethics Commission is making it easier to see how much money is being spent on ballot measures. The commission has expanded the searchable database of campaign finance records to include committees formed to support or oppose a ballot measure. State law requires groups that receive or spend money for ballot measures to form a committee at least 30 days before the election."

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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Private Investigator NewsWyoming Supreme Court rules teachers salaries are public record

""Today, the Wyoming Supreme Court ruled that any school employee's salary is a public record. The court upheld Laramie County District Court earlier decision in favor of Cheyenne Newspapers, Inc., which publishes the Wyoming Tribune Eagle."

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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Private Investigator News: Truthful statement can't give rise to tort claims

"A blogger’s request to overturn a jury verdict ordering him to pay $60,000 in damages for truthful comments that got an ex-community leader fired has attracted media support. The Minnesota Pro Chapter of Society of Professional Journalists has filed a brief arguing that the judgment should not stand.

A Hennepin County jury found earlier this month that an online statement by John Hoff, who blogs under the pseudonym Johnny Northside, about former neighborhood official Jerry Moore was not false. Nonetheless, the jury also decided that Hoff intentionally interfered with Moore’s employment contract with the University of Minnesota, awarding him $35,000 for loss of contractual benefits and $25,000 for “emotional distress or actual harm to reputation,” according to a friend-of-the-court brief the Minnesota SPJ filed in Moore v. Hoff."

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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Private Investigator News: Case-Sensitive Google Search

"This application is particularly useful for searching for a person’s name in Google as it returns results in the same case as given by the user." 

Might be useful to force capitalization on personal names, such as "Rob."

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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Private Investigator News: Va. FOI restrictions challenged by RCFP

"The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press today filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of a challenge to a Virginia statute that limits access to state and local public records to Virginia residents.

Joined by 21 news media companies and journalism organizations, the Reporters Committee brief argues the statute is unconstitutional because it discriminates between Virginia citizens and everybody else, creating a substantial burden on the rights of journalists.

“Although the statute allows news organizations that have significant numbers of viewers or readers in Virginia to make public records requests, the law gives an overwhelming majority of media nationwide no legal right to get public records of great interest to the entire country,” said Reporters Committee Executive Director Lucy A. Dalglish. “In today’s Internet-centric world, limiting access based on geography is antiquated and pointless.”

Although the case of McBurney v. Young involves two non-journalists who live outside Virginia and are seeking information from government agencies there, the implications for news gathering make this case of great interest to reporters, who frequently cover major stories in the Commonwealth."

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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Private Investigator News: FTC Finalizes Settlement with Data Broker Agency Charged Privacy Pledges Were Deceptive

"Following a public comment period, the Federal Trade Commission has accepted a final settlement with an online data broker that charged consumers $10 based on the false promise that it could “lock their records” so that others could not see or buy them. The FTC charged that its claims were deceptive and violated federal law. The settlement, first announced September 22, 2010, requires that the broker, US Search, refund the fees it charged to nearly 5,000 consumers, and it bars misrepresentations about the effectiveness of any service that claims to remove information about consumers from the broker’s website."

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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Private Investigator News: Social media sites are new investigative tool | sites, social, tool

"With social networking sites such as Facebook becoming more a part of people’s everyday lives, authorities have noticed citizens taking the initiative in flushing out clues to help solve crimes by creating pages asking the public for help."

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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Private Investigator News: South Carolina bill targets prisoners on Facebook

"The proliferation of cell phones smuggled into prisons has some inmates routinely updating their status from the inside, and South Carolina is considering becoming the first state to make that a crime.

The measure would add 30 days to a prisoner's sentence if he is caught interacting on social networking sites via cell phone. The bill goes a step further, too, making it illegal for anyone to set up a page for a prisoner, which legal experts say violates inmates' free speech rights even if they are using contraband cell phones."

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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Private Investigator News: Jurors’ privacy rights collide with press, public’s right to know in high-profile cases

"When anonymous jurors begin hearing Barry Bonds’ perjury trial this week, they can credit their privacy partly to former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

The judge in Bonds’ case in San Francisco, Susan Illston, alluded to the media crush at Blagojevich’s first corruption trial in Chicago in ruling she’d keep jurors’ names secret until after a verdict.

She cited Judge James Zagel’s decision to protect Blagojevich jurors from what he called media “harassment.”

It rekindles a dilemma in high-profile trials: How should judges balance jurors’ right to privacy with the public’s right to know?"

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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Private Investigator News: Sunshine Week public record requests meet with resistance

"Times-Delta and Advance-Register staff members celebrated public records laws by conducting a week-long audit of access at local public agencies.

Our reporters were assigned to test access to ordinary public documents at six public agencies in Tulare County, ranging from the Tulare County Office of Education to a small water district.

What we found was that while some local officials go to great lengths to comply with the law, others aren't as open about the way they do business.

At practically every stop, requests for the documents were met with suspicion."

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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Private Investigator News: Mocavo.com - a Genealogy Search Engine

"I suggest you remember this web site: Mocavo.com. I bet you are going to hear a lot about it in the next few weeks and months. In fact, I'd suggest you try it right now. I've been using the site for a while during its testing and have been very impressed. This thing actually works! Today, Mocavo.com went public and is now available to everyone.

Mocavo.com is a genealogy search engine that is available to you at no charge. It searches hundreds of thousands of genealogy web sites, looking for the words that you specify. Web sites searched include thousands of genealogy message boards, society web pages, genealogy pages uploaded by individuals, state historical societies, family societies, Find-A-Grave, the Internet Archive (mostly scanned genealogy books from the Allen County Public Library), the Library of Congress, several sites containing scanned images of old photographs, and tens of thousands of distinct sites sites that contain various transcribed records of genealogical interest."

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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Private Investigator News California gets a D-plus on government transparency

"Democrats like to think of themselves as champions of transparency in government, but according to a new report from the California Public Interest Research Group, there is little difference between red states and blue states when it comes to openness.

That’s from the latest “Follow the Money” study from CALPIRG. That report, released Tuesday, rated California the 31st most transparent state in the country with an overall ranking of D ."

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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Private Investigator News: Oklahoma State employee birth date issue in limbo as Oklahoma Supreme Court considers appeals

"A pending case before the Oklahoma Supreme Court about the disclosure of state employee birth dates has led to little enthusiasm at the Legislature to add employee exemptions to the Open Records Act."

"In February 2010, The Oklahoman made an open records request to the Office of Personnel Management for basic information, including name, salary, title, birth dates and employee identification numbers for all state employees.

The newspaper made the request in an effort to check the backgrounds of public employees. Without a secondary identifier like a birth date, it's almost impossible to distinguish between people with common names in court records or other public documents."

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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Private Investigator News: Ca Judges resist plan to unify court system in California

"The crowning achievement in the career of former Chief Justice Ron George of California was expected to be the result of his crusade to drag the nation's largest state court system into the 21st century: a computer system linking every courthouse in the state's 58 counties.

As envisioned a decade ago, the system would allow anyone in any courthouse to get real-time information on just about any case in the state.

Instead, the state auditor has concluded that court officials have managed the project so poorly that it has been installed in just seven counties since 2004, and to mixed reviews. "

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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Private Investigator News: Federal appeals court denies access to mugshots

"In a departure from a ruling of another circuit, the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that a mug shot was exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. The court said to release the mug shots would violate the person’s privacy rights."

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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Private Investigator News: Oregon AG Asks Lawmakers To Simplify Public Records Act

"Urging support for his proposal to improve government transparency, Oregon's attorney general told lawmakers Monday that the state's public records law is a convoluted legal mess that serves neither government nor the public.

State statutes are littered with more than 400 exemptions to the state public records law, making compliance expensive and time-consuming, Democrat John Kroger told the Senate Committee on General Government, Consumer and Small Business Protection."
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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Private Investigator News: Court Rules Against Privacy in Battle Over Twitter Records

"A federal magistrate judge in Virginia ruled today that the government can collect the private records of three Twitter users as part of its investigation related to WikiLeaks, and that those users and the public can be prevented from seeing some of the documents that the government submitted to the court to justify obtaining their records."

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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Private Investigator News: Illinois gun owners names may be public

"Revealing the names of individuals who have firearm permits does not invade personal privacy or endanger gun owners, the Illinois public access counselor said in an opinion released this week. An Associated Press reporter requested the names in September 2010 under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act and was denied access by the Illinois State Police." Read more
Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Private Investigator News: Facebooking in Court: Coping With Socially Networked Jurors

"Last month, one Michigan juror found out. Before the case was over, this juror posted on Facebook how it was 'gonna be fun to tell the defendant they're GUILTY.' Alert defense counsel saw the posting, and the trial judge dismissed the juror, fined her $250 and ordered her to write a five-page essay about the constitutional right to a fair trial."

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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Private Investigator News: Washington cases reaffirm steps to protect public's court access

"Two decisions last month by the Washington Court of Appeals reaffirmed the procedural steps a trial court must take before sealing juror questionnaires from the public and the news media. Those decisions, along with another recent appellate ruling, also highlighted the differences between the rights of the public to open court proceedings and that of criminal defendants to have a public trial."

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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Private Investigator News: Fear, frustration in quest for public records seekers in MA

"A regionwide examination by The Enterprise found residents who seek information covered by the state’s public record law face a good chance of being met by staff who are unfamiliar with the law and, in some cases, would interrogate people making requests for public documents."

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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Private Investigator News: Federal privacy act doesn't bar release of admission records

"A federal judge ruled this week that the U.S. Family Education Rights and Privacy Act does not bar the University of Illinois from releasing to the Chicago Tribune admission records of applicants who appeared on a list of well-connected students."

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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Private Investigator News: Utah bill restricts public records

"Utah Gov. Gary Herbert has signed a bill revising the state's open-records law only hours after more than 100 people rallied against the bill in the Capitol rotunda.

House Bill 477 makes the text messages and voice mails of government officials private and restricts access to most communication, including e-mails, between legislators and staff or constituents. Fees for records are to increase when the new law becomes effective July 1."

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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Florida judge orders debt collection agency to not contact woman on Facebook

"A Florida judge has ordered a debt collection agency to not use Facebook — or any other social media site — in an attempt to locate a woman for a $362 unpaid car loan."

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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Private Investigator Research Links - Feb 2011

• The central database for UK burials and cremations at Deceased Online
  
  
• Using Social Networking Site Information in the Courtroom
  
  
• Reading and Editing Photo Metadata
  
  
• Evidence Technology Magazine
  
  
• Criminology and Criminal Justice Resources
  
  
• Newspapers searched by Google News Archive Search
  
  
• Data Recovery Services
  
  
• Deep Web Research resources 2011
  
  
• National Indian Law Library, Tribal Law, Tribal Codes and Tribal Constitutions
  
  
• Mergers and Acquisitions Portal
  
  
• SMS Spoofing Number
  
  

The rest of my favorite links are here.