Mark Horvit, executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, spoke about doing deep background checks on candidates for local office at RJI's "Down-home Democracy: Empowering Citizens With Outstanding Coverage of Local Elections" on Friday, Jan. 31, 2014.

1. Investigative
Reporters and
Editors

2. 
Run every candidate in key races through the
same basic checks. This can include things
like:
Have they paid their property taxes?
 Do they have any liens?
 Do they have criminal records?
 Are there any civil suits against them?
 Any discipline from professional licensing bodies?


4. 
Advanced search

Think about how people live online:
Email addresses
 User names
 Phone Numbers


5. •
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•
•
•
•
Ask.com (Subject-Specific Popularity™)
Yippy.com (clustered results)
Yahoo! (directory)
Bing
Duck Duck Go
Browsys

6. 
Who is he/she?
 Google, yes, Google
 Also check at least one other search engine.

Where has he/she lived?
 Zabasearch

Does the person still live there? Do they own?
 Subtitle: Property records are fun
 BRB Publications

7. 
Court records (both for business and people).

Find neighbors with whitepages.

Sex offender registry.

Corporate records

Professional licenses

8. Pipl
 123people
 SocialMention
 Whostalkin
 Samepoint
 Icerocket
 PeekYou
 Topsy


10. Domain
searches can reveal a lot.
Domain Tools http://www.domaintools.com
Allwhois http://www.allwhois.com
Quarkbase

11. 
Search by image with Google

Search by image with Tin Eye

EXIF
Exchangeable Image File: the file format used
by most digital cameras. Usually consists of the
JPEG file format along with metadata tags.
Firefox add-on

12. 
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Search engine cache (Google, Bing)
Wayback Machine
Library of Congress’ archiving project: Mapping
the Internet Electronic Resources Virtual
Archive (MINERVA)
CyberCemetery – sites of defunct government
agencies and commissions