"It is all collected and delivered to the desktop in seconds," Vaules said.
The service is not intended for employment screening and has so far only been sold to insurance company investigators or donated to law enforcement agencies, said Judi Schultz, a LexisNexis spokeswoman. But she said that the company was considering making it more widely available.
Some may shudder at the ease with which researchers can now connect the dots of people's lives. J. Bradley Jansen, a privacy advocate at the Free Congress Foundation, a research group, views some of the background checks as the equivalent of "collecting data on innocent people." He said he would like to see "a stressed importance and awareness of the potential abuse of these records."
What if, for example, companies or individuals conduct searches out of idle curiosity under the guise of an authorized purpose? Some people worry that the more integrated such sources of information become, they will start to resemble de facto national identity databases, ripe for abuse and for the kind of errors that can brand a person for life.
In 1999 a woman was placed in handcuffs as she started her first day of training for a job at the San Diego district attorney's office because a warrant had been issued for her arrest, local news reports said. It turned out that her car and several pieces of identification had been stolen and the thief had assumed her identity before being charged with marijuana possession with intent to sell and possession of an assault weapon.
Although laws exist to protect consumers from some intrusions, many privacy advocates say that those statutes have loopholes or do not go far enough. The requirement that employers obtain the consent of job applicants to carry out a background check is one example. A job candidate does not want to be "a boat rocker," said Givens of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, adding, "How many applicants are going to say, I don't give you consent?"
Privacy aside, skeptics question whether the rise in background checks will actually make the country more secure. Jeffrey Ian Ross, a criminologist at the University of Baltimore, said that he was not convinced that more sophisticated databases would alert the authorities to potential problems because criminals, including terrorists, generally try to avoid being detected by background checks in the first place.
"These 19 people who hijacked the planes -- they didn't buy a house," Ross said. "They didn't go and apply for loans to buy vehicles."
If anything, he said, sophisticated criminals will use technology to stay one step ahead of investigators -- stealing identities by retrieving personal information from the public records that are now so easily available.
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