WIRED FROM THE VALLEY: Private investigators are finding the internet a useful tool when they are trying to uncover data about almost anything
The first thing they all say about private investigators is: it's not like the movies. Except, sometimes, when it is. Like when the gentlemen came to Cynthia Hetherington at her desk at Louis Bay Library in Hawthorne, New Jersey, and asked if she knew where to look for books on bromide poisoning. He was a private investigator, he explained, hired by a woman who suspected her husband of slowly poisoning her.
Ms Hetherington didn't know much about poisoning with bromide or otherwise but she knew where to look. And, being a technical sort, the first place she approached, even in 1992, was the internet.
She posted a message on FORENS-L, a mailing list devoted to "the forensic aspects of anthropology, biology, chemistry, odontology, pathology, psychology, serology, toxicology, criminalistics, and expert witnessing and presentation of evidence in court".
Everyone helps a librarian. Details were provided and the online chorus soon came back with a suggestion. Could the symptoms be some form of metallic poisoning? The PI's client was the wife of a gold dealer and he immediately relayed to the woman that there was a strong chance she was being poisoned, in the footsteps of Auric Goldfinger, by her husband's own finely ground supplies.
Ms Hetherington was, of course, hooked. Nowadays, she's a private investigator of sorts herself - and one of the first stops for any detective who needs to glean a little knowledge from the online world.
These days she calls herself an independent information professional, but she'll fall back to librarian when she's cold-calling experts on the phone.
She adopts the same gentle country accent with me. "I wonder if you could help me with a question from one of my patrons?" She laughs. Everyone wants to help the librarian.
Like any industry, private detectives have been shaken and stirred by the arrival of PCs and the internet.
"These days, you get court rooms that are like something out of Star Wars", says Mr Rory McMahon, who has spent the past decade working as an investigator in Fort Lauderdale. "Everything's on a screen."
And as the law modernises, so does the private wing of the law. Private investigation in the United States can be a very competitive business. In Mr McMahon's home state of Florida, there are more than 9,000 licensed PIs.
"A lot of those are retired police officers, working on the side for a little spending money. They don't know about computers, so they'll pay $100 to some information broker for data they could dig up with a three-minute internet search." Slowly, the computer-weary are being priced out of the market and the money is moving to online sleuths like Ms Hetherington.
And for the everyday work of the modern PI - corporate due diligence, background checks on employees, finding missing persons and, yes, the occasional marital poisoning - the internet is the first place to turn. And not just for reference: business websites, public records, even email archives and personal homepages all provide a trail that can be as revealing as sitting in a parked car with a camera outside an apartment block.
Mr McMahon speaks of a recent case, when a simple online search of a prospective witness's business records in a fraud case revealed the witness's criminal connections to another fraudulent scam - while he was under the direction of the unknowing FBI. All this was discovered without McMahon picking up the phone or leaving his desk.
Private investigators are heavily regulated in most states of the US, and the subscription-only databases that they use to track credit and banking records have strong restrictions to prevent misuse. "We can't just go looking up info on you for the fun of it," says Ms Hetherington. "I have to have a permissible purpose."
But this information is not hiding out in hard-to-access, carefully fenced-off databases. "Eighty per cent of the evidence I use comes from publicly available sources online. Subscription services make it easier to search and organise, but they draw mostly from the same open data," she says.
After September 11th, Ms Hetherington was contacted by one of the top 20 richest men in the US. Her assignment: find out everything you can about me. She did the job twice: once using her dedicated, private, paid-for PI sources and once with just the public internet. The first search took her under an hour; the second took her three days - but she got the same detailed dossier on her client's private life. For instance: the non-profit site www.guidestar.org publishes the public records of registered charities to allow potential donors to check their integrity. Looking up a local scout troupe revealed her client's name - and his ex-directory address.
The fact is that the internet not only makes private investigator's lives easier, it enables anyone to become an amateur detective.
Some of those effects may be limited to the US. Most states have little privacy legislation and public records tend to be open and accessible.
But the PI business is increasingly international. And if your local data protection laws are too strong for the curious, there's always elsewhere. Information leaks.
"It's amazing how much I find out from The Irish Times", says Ms Hetherington - flattering but a little disturbing.
And how does it feel to be a professional fact-finder wandering around this new, very public library?
"It makes me absolutely paranoid," she says. "But then, as a librarian, I always knew this information was out there, somewhere. Now, it's just easier to find."
