Americans, whether they realize it or not, leave a trail of data with every life step. As soon as a person is married or divorced, basic details about the event goes on file at the local courthouse for anybody to browse. The same can be said for anyone who has registered to vote, acquired a professional license, bought a piece of real estate, filed for bankruptcy, been convicted of a crime or simply moved and listed a new address and phone number.
And those are just the public records. Other information -- like driving records, credit histories and Social Security numbers -- is available to companies and individuals under certain legal guidelines, for example, in cases when a person consents to a search of his past.
"There is a whole body of information out there in public records that people are generally not aware of," said James Lee, a spokesman for ChoicePoint, a company based near Atlanta that compiles and searches public records.
Before the dawn of the Web, most of this personal information remained out of the spotlight. Because records were stored in the offices of individual companies and courts, often in backroom file cabinets or offline computer systems, they were difficult and costly to search. The shift to digital storage has meant that many of those records are now widely available.
Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the demand for such information has increased -- and the inquiries are coming not only from law enforcement agencies. Organizations that conduct background checks report a surge in requests over the past two months from companies that want to screen job applicants and employees. More employers are discovering that they can now tap into a new generation of databases that integrate public and some private records, making the search process easier and less expensive than ever.
"Background checks used to be a luxury; now they are a necessity," said Christopher Ballas, general manager of Backgrounds Online, a company that uses databases of public and private records to retrieve information for employers and other institutions. He said that the company had seen a 33 percent increase in business in the past month from employers who are re-evaluating security.
"They see how easy it was for hijackers to get through and onto the airlines," he said. "So now they are asking themselves, Who is in our business? Who is handling our books?"
Officials in human resources departments also report that they are conducting more background checks. In a survey conducted on Sept. 18 by the Society for Human Resource Management, a membership organization, respondents answered questions about how the workplace had been affected by the attacks. Nearly one-quarter identified "the screening of employees for hiring" as one of the most significant changes.
Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a watchdog group in San Diego, said that within a day after the attacks she began receiving calls from employers who wanted to know how to look into their employees' histories while still complying with privacy laws. (The answer, in most cases, was that they must at least get permission from the employees first.)
The leap in demand, several screening companies say, is coming from employers of all kinds -- whether they hire airline workers, truck drivers, accountants or hotel managers. The companies would not name specific clients, although Lee at ChoicePoint said that "40 percent are Fortune 100 clients." Some employers have even decided to run checks on people who have worked for them for years.
"We have gotten calls from many clients who want to go back and recheck every single employee who is working for them today," said David Cook, ChoicePoint's vice president for the workplace division.
The increase in checks would not be so pronounced, database experts say, without recent advances in technology. Most databases of electronic records are now Web-based and therefore available on the desktop of almost anyone with the right passwords. For example, corporate subscribers to services of the giant database company LexisNexis can simply plug a person's name into a search box and instantly find out the person's birth date, phone numbers, and current and previous addresses. Users of Crime.com, a fee-based online service, can obtain similar information, as well as a person's criminal record.
Some online services have started to link once-disparate databases in a single file. For years, nationwide searches of criminal records required separate checks of individual databases for every state and county in the country or trips to courthouses for records that are not yet in digital form. But this month ChoicePoint unveiled its National Criminal File, a database of more than 20 million conviction records from jurisdictions around the country. "We have two large clients who want to run a large national criminal search on every one of their employees," said Cook of ChoicePoint. "We've never seen that before."
To test the system, ChoicePoint decided to run a batch of names from previous screenings. One of the names, Cook said, had been submitted by a client who had requested a criminal search only locally, in Florida. No convictions showed up in that search. But when the name was entered into the new nationwide database of criminal convictions this fall, Cook said that records were located in Tennessee. "One was for murder, one for grand theft," he said.
When ChoicePoint told the client about the man's convictions, he said, "we found out that applicant was approved for hire," although the man had ended up not working there.
James Vaules, chief executive of the National Fraud Center, a unit of LexisNexis, has witnessed the changes in information retrieval firsthand. For 27 years Vaules was an agent for the FBI, often working on cases involving money-laundering and white-collar crime.
Before electronic databases were linked, he said, searches of court records were laborious and tedious, involving multiple requests to a central research site and mountains of faxes.
"You got reams of paper that you had to go through," Vaules said. "Then you would have to review it and follow up and initiate another request and wait again."
Vaules left the FBI in 1996 to work at LexisNexis. This summer the company introduced a service called SmartLinx, which integrates material from nearly 1,500 sources in the LexisNexis' stable of databases. A search with a single keyword can pull up a scrolling page of data with dozens of names and addresses of individuals and institutions, many of them hyperlinked so that searchers can delve further to find relationships between pieces of data.
"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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