Google Earth satellite images have become notorious for capturing images of ancient ruins, military installations as well as missile sites.

In yet another bizarre example of the spying power of wired technology in the hands of the public, the UK’s Daily Mail is reporting that Google Earth’s satellite images have caught nude sunbathers in the Netherlands. Ubiquitous computer programs and wired networks are recording and displaying the everyday activities of people. With web searches and Google Earth satellite images, all the world has truly become a stage – and not always for the better.

From the article —

When most people use virtual globe Google Earth, they look up such sights as Sydney Opera House, Big Ben or even their own homes.

But two of the computer program’s users got an extra surprise when they explored the Dutch city of the Hague – and spotted topless sunbathers.

A Dutch blogger looking for his favourite pub accidentally zeroed in on a man wearing just shorts, lying on the roof of a house by a canal.

A woman lying face down on a separate rooftop terrace was spied by an unknown browser who mentioned it on an online forum.

The sunbathers found their way on to Google Earth because they were catching a tan when the satellite used for mapping the planet was passing overhead.

Source: Daily Mail

Executives at Hewlett-Packard aren’t the only people playing “Spy vs. Spy”. According to a recent LA Times article, in our current high-tech, wired and Google world, I spy, you spy, we all spy on people; but we only get mad when someone else spies on us.

From the article –

Women Google prospective dates. Neighbors check what the house next door sold for on Zillow.com. People use online satellite imagery to sneak a peek into the backyards of the rich and famous. Hidden nanny cams record baby sitters. More than 75% of employers monitor what their workers do on the job — and more than a third record every computer keystroke.

“You really have, in a good and bad sense, a democratization of surveillance technology,” said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit technology advocacy group.

For $155, for instance, nervous new parents can buy a wireless camera small enough to hide in a smoke detector to keep tabs on the nanny. It even has night vision. For $60, DisneyMobile sells a kid’s cellular phone with satellite tracking technology developed for the military.

Beth Givens of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego knows one man who is such a privacy “zealot” that he considers any piece of junk mail a violation of personal space.

But he volunteered that he would willingly do a background check if he felt something was amiss about his daughter’s boyfriend. Indeed, he even went dumpster diving to investigate the dealings of a corporation he had invested in.

“People are conflicted, but they are in all aspects of life,” Givens said. “They have one set of standards for themselves and another for others, including large corporations.”

Source: In a High-Tech World, I Spy, You Spy, We Spy

As people search engines grow more powerful, the world grows smaller. This story from The Daily Press reports on a man who reunited a sailor and his lost military hat, 27 years after it was swept out to sea.

After doing an extensive internet search, Vietnam veteran Will Miller reunited sailor Jeff Harris with his lost military cap after 27 years.

From the article –

One cold, rain-swept night in 1979, tethered to the deck of the nuclear attack submarine USS Birmingham (SSN-695) entering Hampton Roads Harbor, sonar technician Jeff Harris was hit by a wind-whipped wave that snatched his ship’s ball cap.

Months later, while walking along Chesapeake Boulevard beach in Hampton, Will Miller, a Vietnam veteran and Navy commander, happened upon Harris’ cap, half-buried in the sand. Knowing how important a ship’s cap is to its owner, Miller salvaged the hat, hoping one day to find its owner. The cap was packed away for years but recently resurfaced at Miller’s Florida home.

“It suddenly fell out of a box onto my computer keyboard, right in front of me,” said Miller. “I guess it was telling me, ‘It’s time to get me home.’ ”

An extensive Internet search led Miller to a USS Birmingham Web site and finally to Harris. The two sent e-mails back and forth, and one night Miller’s phone rang.

“This is Jeff Harris,” the voice on the phone said. “You have my hat!”

The two sailors talked for almost half an hour, exchanging sea stories, the common bond between mariners.

“Most non-seagoing folks wouldn’t appreciate how attached a sailor gets to his hat,” Miller said. “Your hat protects you from sun, wind, salt and cold, and when you lose it, especially one with your ship’s name on it, it’s a big thing. I’m delighted to get it back to Jeff.”

This article shows how powerful free web searches can be, when trying to find people and do background research. If Will Miller can reunite Jeff Harris with his lost military hat after 27 years, you can certainly find the people and background information that you are searching for with a little effort and creativity.

Powerful people search and background search tools are no longer limited to skip tracers and professional private investigators. With search engines like Google and other free people search sites, anyone can find the people and information that they are looking for absolutely FREE.

Source: DailyPress.com.

According to a recent article in PC World, Google has purchased a photo search and image recognition software firm called Neven Vision, paving the way for the gathering of information from digital pictures for use in image recognition searches.

From the article –

Adrian Graham, Picasa product manager, announced the deal in an official Google blog posting today, saying that Neven Vision brings expertise on automatically obtaining information from a photo.

“It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects. This technology just may make it a lot easier for you to organize and find the photos you care about,” Graham wrote.

These types of advances in free and public online web searches will eventually make paid people searches and information providers obsolete for the majority of personal and professional sleuthing.

The AP is reporting on a gross government oversight by L.A. County. A 17 year old girl who was reunited with her biological father after 10 years is suing L.A. County for failing to use “due dilligence” to reunite them sooner.

From the article –

A teenage girl who had a much-celebrated reunion with her father last year after a decade in foster care is now suing the county for taking so long to find him.

Los Angeles County supervisors said last September that the meeting of Melinda Smith, now 17, and her father Thomas Marion Smith, was the result of a “groundbreaking effort,” and congratulated county agencies for locating the father.

But the lawsuit alleges that the Department of Children and Family Services failed to use “due diligence” to locate Thomas Smith as required by law. It claims the agency never notified Smith that his daughter was in foster care and never gave him a chance to claim her.

“He’s a registered voter with a valid driver’s license and an open child support case,” said Smith’s attorney, L. Wallace Pate. “All they had to do, at any time during those 10 years, was pick up the phone and ask the L.A. County Child Support Services Department, `Do you have a contact on this man?’”

County officials would not comment on the case because of the pending litigation.

You can read the entire article @ Girl who was reunited with father sues L.A. County.

ZDNet is reporting that Riya, a creator of advanced facial recognition software for photos, is planning on deploying their technology on the world wide web to offer a web search that would attempt to search and recognize people in the billions of publicly available images online.

From the article –

Currently, Riya allows users to upload photos to its site and users can train the system to recognize faces. It also recognizes text in images, and can slice photos by time taken (not uploaded), location (with a Google Maps mashup) and found text. It also provides tagging, photo sharing and public and private albums. I have over a thousand photos on Riya, and the recognition technology is impressive.

So far, Riya users have uploaded over 7.23 million photos (it launched on March 21), and users have ‘trained’ about 60 percent of the faces uploaded, Shah told me.

He expects to hit 10 million photos in the next six to eight weeks. “As a photo site, we have exceeded the initial growth rate of Flickr,” Shah said. Of course, there is more broadband connectivity than when Flickr came on the scene, but there are also many more photos uploading sites. Flickr was acquired by Yahoo in March 2005, and has over 100,000 million photos.

But Shah isn’t planning to focus on photo organization, sharing and hosting. His goal is to build in capabilities to search across billions of publicly available images. “We are still focused on people uploading [images],” Shah said. “And, we have been a search engine the whole time. We are better at finding people, and our [searching] is growing faster than uploading. You will see us do more crawling and searching of public images in addition to what is uploaded.”

You can read the entire article on ZDNet @ Riya heading into Web search.

You can visit the Riya web site @ Riya.

According to a recent article in the Chicago Tribune and summarized by PC Pro News, a series of internet searches have revealed private and personal details on thousands of CIA operatives.

From the article –

The paper conceded to the CIA’s request not to publish either its findings or the methods it used. But it says the searches it conducted through free and paid-for online databases turned up a ‘virtual directory’ of 2,653 CIA staff, 50 internal agency phone numbers and the sites of two dozen secret facilities across the US.

Some of those uncovered were intelligence analysts. Others were senior officials such as ex CIA Director George Tenet. The list also included undercover agents who are potential terrorist targets and others located in American embassies in Europe.

Online searches for the CIA’s secretive training camp, Camp Peary, of which the agency has never publicly admitted its existence, unearthed 26 individuals employed there. A further search of aviation databases for planes using the camp’s airstrip identified 17 aircraft whose ownership and flight history was also available.

You can read the entire article @ CIA agents find themselves Googled.

ZoomInfo is a specialty people search engine that allows you to search over 27 million people by name or companies that they have worked for. ZoomInfo is a very powerful people search engine that uses advanced search technology to crawl the web for relevant people search information, while weeding out the irrelevant information that most search engines return in their search results.

You can use the ZoomInfo people search @ ZoomInfo

A January 25, 2006 article in The Union Democrat newspaper reported some interesting statistics on missing persons in the state of California:

1. Of the 40,685 adults reported missing statewide in 2004, nearly 83 percent of them left voluntarily, according to the California Department of Justice.

2. In Calaveras County during the same year, 20 of the 43 missing adults left voluntarily, according to the department.

3. In Tuolumne County, 65 of 90 missing adults disappeared on their own, the department said.

You can read the entire article @ Experts: Many disappear on purpose.

Here is a great in-depth article from the Great Falls Tribune on the tricks of the trade used by a few Great Falls, MT bounty hunters. The article discusses numerous tips and tricks of a good bounty hunter that can be used by skip tracers, investigators or anyone conducting a people search or locator.

From the article —

“Human beings are easier to hunt than deer,” said Jack Sanders, another bail bondsman and bounty hunter in Great Falls.

“They’re dumb,” Sanders added. “They’re creatures of habit. A lot of times they’re on meth, and their friends will turn them in for 50 bucks.”

Last summer, Jara persuaded one client’s mom to hand over her fugative son’s address in Wyoming by fabricating a story about a mix-up with the courts.

Then Jara, a former long-time deputy sheriff, drove to the hideout in Jackson Hole and surprised the guy just as he was heading into town for the Fourth of July festivities.

“Part of our success in capturing these fugitives is the trickery and surprise that we use,” said Scott Olson, founder and owner of the oldest bounty hunter training program in the nation.

The main goal of bounty hunting, in fact, is to outsmart the fugitive. Brute force is almost never used.

You can read the entire bounty hunter article by Jared Miller @
Great Falls bounty hunters use brains, tricks of the trade to bring in their man