Thursday, October 13, 2011

Private Investigator News: The ‘Mugshot Racket’: Paying to Keep Public Records Less Public

"It used to be that mugshots were kept well out of the view.  Despite being public records in many states, walls of bureaucracy and simple physical inaccessibility (due to the photos being locked in a police station somewhere) kept them largely out of the public eye.

But the Internet has changed that.  Now, those same photos are uploaded to the web on tens, maybe even hundreds, of police and sheriff websites, giving rise to two new online businesses: the mugshot aggregation website and its opposite number, the mugshot removal website. But as David Kravets wrote in Wired, the interaction of these two types of website is more complicated than it seems. And their dealings call into question the reluctancy of states to centralize public records online in the first place."

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