Essay

If You Run a Red Light, Will Everyone Know?

Max Whittaker for The New York Times

Bryce Lane, president of PeopleFinders, which offers a free service that uses government records to let users check on others’ backgrounds. He says it can contain errors because governments vary in their updating of digital archives.

By BRAD STONE

Published: August 3, 2008

WANT to vet a baby sitter? Need to peek into the background of a prospective employee? Curious about the past of a potential date?

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Last month, PeopleFinders, a 20-year-old company based in Sacramento, introduced CriminalSearches.com, a free service to satisfy those common impulses. The site, which is supported by ads, lets people search by name through criminal archives of all 50 states and 3,500 counties in the United States. In the process, it just might upset a sensitive social balance once preserved by the difficulty of obtaining public documents like criminal records.

Academics have a term for the old inaccessibility of records like those for criminal convictions: “practical obscurity.” Once upon a time, people in search of this data had to hire private investigators to navigate byzantine courthouses and rudimentary filing or computer systems, and to deal with often grim-faced legal clerks. In a way, the obstacles to getting criminal information maintained a valuable, ignorance-fueled civil peace. Convicts could start fresh after serving their time without strangers knowing their pasts, and there was little risk that unsophisticated researchers could confuse people with identical names.

Well, not anymore. The information on CriminalSearches.com is available to all comers. “Do you really know who people are?” the site blares in large script at the top of the page.

Databases of criminal convictions first moved online several years ago. But users of pay sites like Intelius.com and PeopleScanner.com had to enter their credit card numbers for access — often enough of an obstacle to discourage casual or improper inquiries.

According to Bryce Lane, president of PeopleFinders, the new site draws data directly from local courthouses and offers records of arrests and convictions in connection with everything from murder to minor infractions like blowing past a stop sign — at least for jurisdictions that include traffic violations in their criminal data. It also lets users view a map showing addresses and names of all those arrested or convicted of a crime in a specific neighborhood, and to place alerts that prompt e-mail when someone in their life gets busted or someone with a record moves in nearby.

“We are just trying to provide what’s already out there in an easier fashion, for free,” Mr. Lane said. “We think it’s pretty helpful to families.”

PeopleFinders, originally called Confi-Check, was founded in 1988 by Rob Miller, a former investigator for Intel. PeopleFinders has been selling records to consumers for the last decade and recently acquired a large public-records firm — Mr. Lane declines to say which one because the transaction was private — that allowed it to introduce the expanded free service.

Mr. Lane concedes that his site contains some mistakes. Every locale has its own computer system, he notes, and some are digitizing and updating records faster than others.

A quick check of the database confirms that it is indeed imperfect. Some records are incomplete, and there is often no way to distinguish between people with the same names if you don’t know their birthdays (and even that date is often missing).

To further test the site, I vetted some of my colleagues at The New York Times. One, who shall remain nameless, had a recent tangle with the law that the site labeled a “criminal offense,” while adding no other information. Curious, I called my colleague with the date and city of the now very public ignominy. The person was stunned to know that the infraction — a speeding ticket — was easily accessible and described as criminal.

“I went to traffic school so this wouldn’t appear on my record. I’m in shock. This blows me away,” my colleague said, demanding that I ask PeopleFinders how to have the record removed. “I don’t necessarily want you all knowing that I’m a fast driver.”

PeopleFinders’ response: take it up with the authorities. When they update their records, the change will automatically appear on CriminalSearches.com.

My colleague’s quandary illustrates why privacy advocates work themselves into knots about this kind of site. In the past, Congress carefully considered how the public should use criminal records. Amendments to the Fair Credit Reporting Act in 1997 required that employers who hire investigators to obtain criminal records from consumer reporting agencies advise prospective employees of the search in advance, and disregard some types of convictions that are older than seven years.

“I don’t think Congress stuck that in there randomly,” says Daniel J. Solove, a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School and author of “Understanding Privacy.” “Congress made the judgment that after a certain period of time, people shouldn’t be harmed by having convictions stick with them forever and ever.”

BUT now, of course, none of the old restrictions apply. The information is available from a variety of sources, and now free. Jurors can and almost certainly will be tempted to look up criminal pasts of defendants in their cases. And employers can conduct searches themselves without hiring investigators. Mr. Lane of PeopleFinders says that employers cannot legally use the database in making hiring decisions — but there is nothing to stop them.

A recent investigation at the Justice Department demonstrates how once-obscure, now easily accessible public information can be abused in egregious ways. The investigative report by the department’s inspector general and internal ethics office said government lawyers mined sites like Tray.com and OpenSecrets.org, which report on individual political contributions, to discover political affiliations of job candidates.

But the Internet entrepreneurs who are making public records accessible have little patience for the privacy worrywarts who are getting in the way of their business goals.

“I think people generally understand the 21st-century reality that this type of public information is going to be widely available,” said Nick Matzorkis, the chief executive of ZabaSearch, a search engine that provides people’s addresses and phone numbers, culled from public records. CriminalSearches.com “is another indication of the inevitability of the democratization of public information online,” Mr. Matzorkis said.

Mr. Lane of PeopleFinders concurs and compares his site to the seat belt, saying it will make everyone safer.

Of course, that is easy for them to say. According to CriminalSearches.com, they are both clean.

Launch of Private Rocket Fails; Three Satellites Were Onboard

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Published: August 3, 2008

A privately funded rocket was lost on its way to space Saturday night, bringing a third failure in a row to an Internet multimillionaire's effort to create a market for low-cost space-delivery.

The accident occurred a little more than two minutes after launch, and the two-stage Falcon 1 rocket appeared to be oscillating before the live signal from an on-board video camera went dead.

"We are hearing from the launch control center that there has been an anomaly on that vehicle," said Max Vozoff, a mission manager and launch commentator for Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, on a webcast of the event soon afterward.

Elon Musk, an Internet entrepreneur, founded the company, known as SpaceX, in 2002 after selling his online payment company, PayPal, to eBay for $1.5 billion. The company, based in Hawthorne, Calif., has been hailed as one of the most promising examples of an entrepreneurial "new space" movement, and has 525 employees.

In a statement read by a spokeswoman early Sunday morning during a teleconference with reporters, Mr. Musk said, "It was obviously a big disappointment not to reach orbit" on the flight. He referred to the first stage of the launching as "picture perfect," but said, "unfortunately, a problem occurred with stage separation, causing the stages to be held together. This is under investigation."

The rocket was launched from the Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific at 11:34 p.m. Eastern time, after several hours of delays and one aborted launch attempt.

The first Falcon 1 launch, in March 2006, failed about a minute into its ascent because of a fuel line leak. A second rocket, launched in March 2007, made it to space but was lost about five minutes after launching.

On this flight, the Falcon carried three small satellites: one, called Trailblazer, for the Department of Defense, which was built as a kind of quick-turnaround demonstration. The two others were for NASA: PRESat, a small automated laboratory, and NanoSail-D, a test of the concept of using sunlight to push a thin solar sail and provide propulsion without propellant.

The rocket was also carrying the ashes of 208 people who had paid to have their remains shot into space, including the astronaut Gordon Cooper and the actor James Doohan, who played Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, the wily engineer on the original "Star Trek" television series. The service is called an "Explorers Flight" by the company that arranges them, Celestis, Inc. Last night the company's web page stated, "The Explorers Flight mission appears not to have reached orbit tonight," and the Wikipedia pages of Cooper and Doohan had already been edited early Sunday morning to reflect the news.

The company is also developing a larger rocket, the Falcon 9, with nine engines in the first stage. That vehicle is intended to provide cargo services to the International Space Station under a contract for NASA after the shuttle program winds down in 2010. SpaceX performed a successful test firing of the Falcon 9 engines at its facilities in McGregor, Tex., last week.

Charles Lurio, an independent space consultant, it should not be surprising to lose single-use rocket vehicles in the early stages of development, because their very design does not allow test flights. "It's all or nothing once it leaves the pad," he said. "But I hope SpaceX keeps trying," he said. "They're very competent people."

In Mr. Musk's statement, he insisted that the company will not be deterred and still has strong support from its backers. "SpaceX will not skip a beat in execution going forward," he said, and added that the fourth flight, currently scheduled to take place in the fourth quarter of the year, and fifth flights are being prepared, and that he has given the go-ahead "to begin fabrication of flight 6."

And, he added, "We are in very good financial basis here. We have the resolve, we have the financial base, and we have the expertise" to identify the problem and go forward. "There should be no question about that." In a version of the statement distributed to employees, Mr. Musk said that the company "recently accepted a significant investment" that, along with the company's current cash reserves, will ensure that "we will have more than sufficient funding on hand to continue launching" the Falcon 1 and the larger Falcon 9 vehicles.

In the teleconference, Diane Murphy, the company spokeswoman, said that the mood at the company's headquarters quickly switched from excitement and cheers at the seemingly successful launch to concern and then disappointment. But when Mr. Musk addressed the employees, she said, and told them that the company would move forward with the fourth flight, "One of our employees immediately spoke up and said with great resolve, 'yes we will. We will get to orbit' — and everyone sent up a cheer."