Crime Time Publishing has created a powerful and free social security number search site called SSN Validator that allows users to validate social security numbers against official data from the US Government’s Social Security Administration records.

Users can search a given social security number on the SSN Validator and the site will compare it to information on over 414 million issued social security numbers and return some very helpful information about the given ssn.

SSN Validator search results include:

1. State that the ssn was issued in.

2. Approximate year that the ssn was issued.

3. Whether or not the ssn has been issued by the Social Security Administration.

4. Information about whether or not the ssn appears to belong to a deceased individual as recorded in the Social Security Administration’s Death Masterfile.

The SSN Validator search is great for employers who want to do a quick and easy lookup on a prospective employee’s social security number, as well as professional skip tracers and people searchers, who want to find out which state a person’s ssn was issued in – for the possible lookup or relatives sharing the same last name.

You can check out the SSN Validator at www.ssnvalidator.com.

EastValleyTribune.com is reporting on an Arizona Court of Appeals ruling, favoring faster responses on the part of state and local governments to public records requests.

The Arizona Court of Appeals ruled unanimously on Tuesday that government departments cannot make people wait for weeks or months for public records that have been requested.

The public records ruling states in part that government records custodians “shall promptly furnish such copies, photographs or printouts.” The ruling goes further by saying that any public records request that is not handled promptly is deemed to have been denied.

The ruling did not specify a time for “promptly”. However, Justice Murray Snow stated that there is no way that a delay of more than 100 days, as happened in a case involving the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, can be considered reasonable.

The ruling acknowledged that delays have to be judged on a case-by-case basis. However, the justices also concluded that public agencies can’t avoid their legal duties for prompt responses simply because a government employee neglected to honor the request.

The public records legal case involves a number of requests made by New Times for sheriff records. These ranged from personnel records to investigation reports about Dan Saban — at the time of the request, Dan Saban was running against incumbent Sheriff Joe Arpaio — on sexual misconduct charges.

The records requests took over 143 days to handle, after the election was over.

The court ruled that this was not a “prompt” handling of the request under Arizona’s public records laws.

The ruling, however, does not end the legal battle. The judges sent the case back to the trial judge to decide if the delays were in bad faith or were arbitrary and capricious. These legal standards will determine if the county is obligated to pay the legal fees for the newspaper.

Source: EastValleyTribune.com

The Reuters news service is reporting that Swedish software company Polar Rose is planning on making their facial recognition software publicly available on the internet within the first half of 2008. Polar rose is hoping that their service will become the must-have “killer app” of people recognition in digital images across the web.

Polar Rose claims that their recognition service can pick out people’s faces in the growing number of online images, making the images searchable just like words on a web page.

The Polar Rose software will be available as a free plug-in for web browsers and will also be placed on partner web sites. They hope to launch the service on the first partner sites as early as this month.

Current image searches use the text and words attached to an digital picture, which makes things difficult if the pictures are incorrectly tagged or are missing useful identification. Polar Rose will scan 2D digital images and construct a 3D model from the person’s face to create a “faceprint”, which will be stored and indexed for searches. This will allow people to sort and group people’s photos by face and allow people to search for similar photos across the world wide web.

Google also got into digital image search when they took over Neven Vision a year and a half ago.

This could be a major advance in locating a person through images using online people search engines. The better these technologies become at finding people’s faces in images the more likely you will be able to not only locate someone by name, phone number or address in a search, but, eventually, you should be able to locate their image with a digital “faceprint” search as well.

If this technology is ever paired with mapping services like Google Maps, you may be able to someday find a person’s image along with a name, time, date as well as the geographic location that the digital picture was taken in. Just think of the future possibilities as they relate to doing people searches. This could take the task of searching for a person to the next level. Just think of the possibilities.

Source: Reuters.com

The Associated Press is reporting on a story out of Washington, where the public records requests of a convicted and imprisoned arsonist are testing the state’s public records laws.

Allan Parmelee has been filing hundreds of public records requests in an attempt to dig up background information on the judges, attorneys and police officers that helped convict him in the firebombing the cars of two attorneys.

Now a prosecutor is asking a judge for permission to ignore Parmelee’s public record requests and to bar him from filing any more. King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg wrote a declaration, stating that Parmelee was using the state’s open public records laws to harrass law enforcement officials and other employees in the criminal justice system.

From his prison cell, Parmelee has requested numerous public records, including physical addresses, pictures, payroll records, work schedules, professional backgrounds and birth records — for thousands of Washington State’s police officers and state Department of Corrections employees.

A number of requests since last October request public records about all of Prosecutor Satterberg’s office as well as pictures and personnel records for three assistant prosecutors who worked on his case. Parmelee is also seeking video and other electronic images of two Superior Court judges, including the judge that sentenced him to 24 years in prison.

Parmelee has also asked the state attorney general’s office for public records pertaining to “working hours, schedules … (and) photographs in color” for eight current and former assistant attorneys general.

This bizarre case is testing the limits of Washington state’s Public Records Act. The state has already won previous orders against disclosing certain records from Parmelee. However, in one particular case, Parmelee was awarded $19,000 in fees from the Department of Corrections for delaying his request for certain public records.

Parmelee can be prosecuted if he uses the information obtained from his record requests to harrass or stalk people from prison.

In Washington State, any government agency or state employee can request a court order blocking the release of public records if that disclosure is viewed as not being in the public interest, even though the records may be allowed by law.

It will be interesting to see where this unusual case goes and how it will impact the public records laws not only of Washington State, but of other states as well.

Source: Associated Press

When most people think about the uses for an online mapping tool like Google Maps, they typically think of it as a good search engine for finding locations and getting driving directions, but have you ever considered Google Maps to be a good option for doing people searches and lookups?

The Google Map search is rapidly becoming a very useful people search engine, especially if you are looking for someone who works in a licensed or professional field. By combining information found on web sites with map locations as well as user contributed information; Google Maps is becoming a good way to find location and personal information on people.

Let’s run through a few example people searches, using Googe Maps, with links to results ( use the loc: handle in your map searches to specify the location of the search) :

1. A general people search for John Doe in the state of California would look like this – John Doe loc: California.

2. A more specific people search for John Doe in the state of California, using quotes around John and Doe would give these results – “John Doe” loc: California.

3. Here is an example of a general people search for John J Doe in the state of California, using a middle initial – John J Doe loc: California.

4. Another people search example for John J Doe in California, using quotes around the name to narrow down the results, would look like this: “John J Doe” loc: California.

5. You can also specify both a city and state in you Google Maps people search by using the loc: handle with the city and state names after it. For example, a search for John Doe in Los Angeles, California would look like this: John Doe loc: Los Angeles, California.

There are numerous options for doing people searches, using the Google Maps search engine. You can do a nationwide search for John Doe in the United States, like John Doe loc: United States.

The possibilities for doing free people searches using Google Maps are endless. The more you practice searching for a person on Google Maps and the more information Google adds to their map search in the future, the better this tool will get for finding and locating people.

Good luck with your people searches.