By the time you have read this short article, you will know the most important aspects concerning the access of US-based criminal records online.
If you are impatient like me, feel free to skip to the end of this article where I link to the resources that you are undoubtedly looking for.
That said, unless you are familiar with online detective services and the legal issues that surround them, I highly recommend you read what I have to say first.
I promise to be as concise as humanly possible.
Lets first begin with a little bit of history.
You may have heard of the Freedom of Information Act, which was introduced in 1966 and passed the following year.
The act has since been amended a number of times to reflect changing social and cultural values, but at its core the message remains the same: freedom to access unclassified government data.
To be exact, the act states that citizens of the United States have the right to access government held information, excluding certain classified and confidential data, most of which is military.
At first this sounds great, unfortunately the act does not bind the government to present the information in an easily accessible way.
The result is that there is no government ran online service or search engine that makes this information accessible.
In reality, the only way to access a lot of this information is by physically visiting government institutions and state libraries and traversing the data manually.
As you can imagine, if you are looking for something specific, the process may involve spending months traveling across the country, reading hundreds of documents.
In the past, private detectives were hired to do this.
Today, there is no longer a need for that.
This is because a number of private, US-based companies have constructed electronic databases by painstakingly inputting government records manually into a digital format.
The result is that in many cases, private investigators are no longer needed.
Instead, for around $20, every US citizen can instantly access the information online.
In fact, once you pay the one time fee, you gain access to not just criminal records, but phone and address records, marriage records, death records, and many other interesting government collected records.