As expected, California Attorney General Bill Locker has filed charges against former Hewlett-Packard executives, data providers and outside investigators that were involved in the HP spying scandal.

From Forbes.com –

Attorney General Bill Lockyer accused two ousted HP insiders – chairwoman Patricia Dunn and chief ethics officer Kevin Hunsaker – and three outside investigators – Ronald DeLia, Matthew DePante and Bryan Wagner – of violating state privacy laws in HP’s attempt to root out the source of boardroom leaks.

The five each face four felony counts in the charges filed Wednesday: use of false or fraudulent pretenses to obtain confidential information from a public utility; unauthorized access to computer data; identity theft; and conspiracy to commit each of those crimes. Each charge carries a fine of up to $10,000 and three years in prison.

The spying problems at HP continue to keep the issue of personal data providers, phone record access and pretexting in the public eye. As a result, more politicians will surely jump on the anti-pretexting bandwagon to pass more restrictive laws against obtaining phone records. This is fine as long as it is done for the right reasons and recognizes legitimate situations that require access to phone records by skip tracers, private investigators and legal professionals.

Source: Charges Filed in HP Spying Scandal

On September 29, 2006 a US House Congressional Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations will hold a hearing on “Internet Data Brokers and Pretexting: Who Has Access to Your Private Records?”

The hearing is scheduled to begin @ 10 AM EST. You will be able to watch the hearing through a live web cast and get transcript information at Internet Data Brokers and Pretexting: Who Has Access to Your Private Records?.

Source: PIBuzz

The Marin Independent Journal has published a professional article on the life and career of local private investigator, Richard Schmidt.

From the article –

RICHARD SCHMIDT may not have Tom Selleck’s red Ferrari or moused chest hair, but this San Rafael private investigator can actually lay claim to tailing cheating spouses, locating missing relatives and discrediting trial witness for multimillion-dollar verdicts.

The thrill of investigations led Schmidt to the field after retiring from a long stint on the San Anselmo police force. But don’t go thinking his days are filled with helicopter flights along the coast or bare-chested tennis matches with wealthy Sausalito wives.

“As a PI, you’re alone all the time,” he says.

Schmidt, 61, was born in upstate New York, but his family relocated to Southern California when he was very young. He grew up in Torrance, joined the Air Force in high school and eventually landed at Hamilton Air Field.

“I spent three and a half years there,” he says.

Schmidt says he always wanted to be a cop, but most law enforcement agencies refused to take him on until after he left the service. However, the San Anselmo chief relaxed the policy and let him work nights, weekends and periods of short staffing until becoming full time.

You can read the entire article @ Life of a sleuth: Schmidt likes challenge of being private investigator.

Wired.com is reporting on a little-known spy agency called the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency that studies satellite imagery for use in dealing with national security issues, government intelligence and natural disasters. Some privacy advocates are worried about the amount and level of information being collected on everyday citizens by the NGA, but the positives appear to far outweigh the negatives with this newest addition to the US intelligence community.

WASHINGTON — A little-known spy agency that analyzes imagery taken from the skies has been spending significantly more time watching U.S. soil.

In an era when other intelligence agencies try to hide those operations, the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, is proud of that domestic mission.

He said the work the agency did after hurricanes Rita and Katrina was the best he’d seen an intelligence agency do in his 42 years in the spy business.

“This was kind of a direct payback to the taxpayers for the investment made in this agency over the years, even though in its original design it was intended for foreign intelligence purposes,” Clapper said in a Thursday interview with The Associated Press.

Geospatial intelligence is the science of combining imagery, such as satellite pictures, to physically depict features or activities happening anywhere on the planet. A part of the Defense Department, the NGA usually operates unnoticed to provide information on nuclear sites, terror camps, troop movements or natural disasters.

You can read the entire Wired article @ Sky Spies Watch Us from Space.

Slate.com has a short and interesting article regarding the use of data mining and social network analysis by the National Security Agency in its efforts to hunt down terrorists and terrorist cells. Social network analysis is used by the NSA as an effective way to establish links between known and potential terrorists.

From the article —

Last Thursday, USA Today reported that the NSA has been collecting the phone records of millions of Americans. The agency is apparently using “data mining” techniques to scour these records for connections between terrorists. According to an intelligence official interviewed by USA Today, the NSA is analyzing this data using “social network analysis.” What’s social network analysis?

A technique to map and study the relationships between people or groups. The basic concept of the social network is familiar to anyone who has used Friendster or played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Social network analysis formalizes this parlor game, using details about the network to interpret the role of each person or group.

In a basic analysis, people are seen as “nodes” and the relationships between them are “links.” By studying the links—in the case of the NSA program, telephone calls—it’s possible to determine the importance (or “centrality”) of each node.

You can read the entire article @ How the NSA Does “Social Network Analysis”.

Managing Information News is reporting that Experian is acquiring background check provider Backgroundchecking.com.

From the article –

Experian, the global information solutions company, has acquired Backgroundchecking.com, an organisation specialising in candidate background checking for job applicants and contractors.

The acquisition will enhance Experian’s existing verification and fraud prevention offerings. It will enable clients to comply with regulations and significantly reduce the risk and impact of taking on an unsuitable candidate or failing to check existing employees and contractors. Given the potential costs of poor hiring decisions, more and more companies are placing a greater emphasis on robust recruitment practices.

You can read the entire article @ Experian Acquires backgroundchecking.com.

The Smoking Gun is reporting on the clever use of Ebay auction monitoring by federal agents to raid an Ecstasy lab in New York City. Federal investigators this week raided a New York City home after spending months monitoring purchases on Ebay of laboratory equipment and chemicals used to manufacture the drug Ecstasy.

You can read the entire article @ Got It On “E”-bay.

PI Buzz is the official blog of Professional Investigator Magazine. Investigation and skip tracing professionals should read the PI Buzz blog and subscribe to their news feeds to keep up to date on the latest news and legislative developments that affect all aspects of the investigation field.

You can visit the PI Buzz blog @ PI Buzz.

NASA is looking to use a photographic laser device that was originally developed to check space shuttle damage to help investigators shoot more detailed images of crime scenes.

The entire NASA announcement appears below –

NASA ‘Shoots’ for Crime Investigators with New Technology

What do a NASA engineer and a detective have in common? The answer is a new NASA photographic laser device that helps look for damages on NASA’s Space Shuttle that can also be used to “shoot” more details in crime scenes.

Engineers at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Kennedy Space Center, Fla., developed the Laser Scaling and Measurement Device for Photographic Images (LSMDPI) to assist scientists who were unable to determine the exact scale of hailstorm damages to the Space Shuttle’s external tank by viewing photographs of the spacecraft on its launch pad.

The LSMDPI is a half-pound black box, powered by a single nickel-cadmium battery that attaches directly to a camera’s tripod mount. Twin lasers, an inch apart, shoot from the box, and add scale to photographs. In other words, the laser offers the ability for someone to look at these special photographs and have a better understanding of just how big or small objects really are. In the case of the Space Shuttle, engineers are now able to measure the distance from one part of the shuttle to a dent from a hailstorm.

Typically, when you use a camera to zoom in on an object, you lose track of the scale that informs you of an object’s actual size. When a picture is taken with the LSMDPI, the image loads into software designed by NASA electrical design engineer Kim Ballard. The user chooses a set of reference points such as a laser pattern of reference point dots that will appear along with the image of the target object. The user also inputs the distance between the reference points. The software then sets the scale based on that distance. This allows the viewer quantifiable perspective on the size of the object. The size of the object’s features can then be found and measured by using the computer software to mark the laser points.

“I think that the greatest contribution that the Laser Scaling Measurement software offers to law enforcement is it ‘un-cuffs’ the investigators hands with digital image evidence by facilitating fast and accurate measurement analysis of anything in a crime scene photo, not just the intended target,” said Ballard. “This aspect opens up the possibility for serendipitous evidence detection after the fact that may not have been obvious at the crime scene. For example, the software may be instrumental in attaining dimensions of articles or their proximity locations within a room that were not previously part of the investigation.”

As it is useful at NASA, the laser device is very helpful for law enforcement. Contractor Jeffrey Kohler of ASRC Aerospace, a company that supports NASA’s Innovative Partnership Office, and his colleagues did an assessment to review the technology and how it could apply to potential commercial markets. “Forensics was at the top of the list,” said Kohler.

Not only can they use it to fully view photos of components from crime scenes such as blood-spatter patterns and graffiti, but can also see the images from different angles (including diagonally, horizontally and vertically) to better analyze and understand the scenes.

In fact, just recently, Ballard was asked by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) to add more capabilities to the LSMDPI software to enable forensics experts to zoom in and out of the image to measure blood spatter details across a wall as well as specific areas. At the FBI’s request, NASA has also enabled compatibility of the image files with.tiff, .png, .gif, and .bmp files as add-ons to .jpg images.

Armor Holdings, Inc. of Jacksonville, Fla., is a leading manufacturer of crime scene investigation accessories, including the new LSMDPI. They manufacture a variety of instruments used by industries that rely on technology to perform efficient and safe tasks. Through Armor, LSMDPI is not only benefiting crime scene investigations, but also photographers and surveillance personnel. It is also becoming increasingly popular in crime laboratories around the world. Following a recent request from Armor, NASA also included English/Metric units — millimeters, centimeters, meters, and kilometers — to support European customers and aerial photography.

Today’s crime investigations often rely on the device to scale evidence since its unique laser beams allow viewers to see image components much more clearly than traditional camera images. Similar technology is also useful in oil and chemical tank monitoring and aerial photography.

You can read the original article with pictures of the device @ How NASA can help detectives.

Andrew Wallenstein with Reuters News is reporting on cable channel TNT’s plans to create a reality television show that would follow the professional adventures of a real-life private investigator.

The Reuters News story is reprinted below —

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – TNT may be ready for a real-life detective to join its programming roster of fictional sleuths.

The top-rated cable network is developing a one-hour reality series that would follow an actual private eye conducting an investigation, sources said.

The untitled project, which will be considered for a pilot order in the summer, would represent a departure for TNT, which stocks its primetime entirely with crime dramas like original series “The Closer” and syndicated fare like “Law & Order.” It will be produced by Bunim/Murray Prods., the firm behind “The Real World” and “The Simple Life.”

But sources suggest that the project doesn’t represent a new direction for TNT, just an experiment the network felt comfortable making with a veteran production outfit like Bunim/Murray. The crime-oriented subject matter also is in keeping with the TNT brand.

The series also was pitched to TNT in the noirish vein of “The Maltese Falcon,” incorporating such classic gumshoe-genre conventions as the weary voice-over, saxophone-drenched score and, of course, the sexy secretary. A few real-life modern-day Humphrey Bogarts drawn from a nationwide talent search are being considered for the lead role.

TNT declined comment.