Modem Operandi : O.C. investigators and data centers are thriving in the age of electronic information. But, fearing loss of privacy and safety, some victims’ rights groups and lawmakers are pushing to restrict such access.

For the street-smart gumshoe of Hollywood fame, the price paid for cracking a tough case was usually a broken rib or a black eye. A more likely occupational hazard for the private investigator of the mid-’90s is eye strain or a sore wrist.

With hundreds of public and corporate records accessible through on-line computer databases, private investigators are spending more time using personal computers and modems to get the facts they need, and less time hanging out on street corners or slipping a five to an informant.

“I live at Big Bear Lake. I couldn’t live here and still do my work without on-line services,” says Cindy Erdelyi, a private investigator. “It’s an extreme timesaver. You can take a look and get (court) case numbers, names and then go do your (face-to-face) research.”

The continually updated databases encompass nearly the entire realm of human activity. They include marriage and divorce records, civil and criminal convictions, credit reports, property transactions, driving records, bankruptcy filings, voter registration and fictitious business names.

Besides saving shoe leather, computer searching has expanded investigators’ service offerings and has turned what once might have been dead ends into results.

A few months ago, Erdelyi, in helping a Southern California woman find the daughter she gave up for adoption 30 years ago, followed a computer trail to an Indiana address, where the daughter’s last known driver’s license had expired.

“In the old days, I might have felt I was at a dead end at that point,” Erdelyi said. “But I was able to use a series of nationwide databases that pick up magazine subscribers’ changes of address, new addresses reported to creditors--things that people report routinely when they move.

“She turned up in Texas, but with an unlisted phone number. So the mother . . . was able to write to her, and they had a happy reunion, because it turned out her daughter had also been looking for the mother.”

Valerie E. Smith, an investigator with the 30-person investigative firm Santoni, Skrifvars and Damerell in Tustin, says she spends at least an hour each day on-line. “Back in the old days, investigators were called gumshoes because they were always on their feet,” she said. “But not everything now has to be done in the field.”

The availability of locater databases, which include magazine publishers’ change-of-address records, mailing lists and phone directories, has fueled a rise in companies that specialize in locating people. One such firm is Find People Fast of St. Louis. For $29, the company uses various databases to assemble a list of phone numbers of up to 99 people who use the same name as the person being sought. If the customer knows the person’s social security number, the fee is $25.

But many people don’t want to be found. And many think that what makes life a little easier for detectives, journalists and lawyers is too often used to infringe on their privacy.

Spurred by victims’ rights groups, House legislators last week voted to limit the release of address data from motor vehicle departments nationwide. In January, the U.S. Postal Service--in a similar attempt to thwart stalkers’ ability to track potential victims--announced it would begin studying a policy of restricting access to change-of-address data.

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Of the nation’s 40,000 or so licensed investigators, many prefer to do their research the old-fashioned way.

“Some investigators won’t touch a computer,” says Leroy Cook of Ion Inc., a nationwide referral and screening service of investigative agencies. “These investigators are great interviewers and love to talk to people. They do good groundwork. Of course, if they really need some data, they’ll go down the hall and use a colleague’s” computer.

John M. Pentecost, a Los Angeles civil investigator for 30 years, scorns reliance on computer searches.

“In investigating civil suits, it doesn’t do you any good to simply know about a suit’s existence; you have to go to the courthouse to read the suit so you know what it’s about,” he said. “So why not just go there in the first place and look at their indexes right there?”

On-line services merely cut down on the expense of one part of the investigator’s workload, said Jack Reed of Information Resource Service Co., a database reseller based in Fullerton.

“The databases are not panaceas or a utopia. They’re merely a place where hard data is stored,” he said. “Then it’s up to the investigator to go into the field and verify that data.”

At CDB Infotek, a large database service in Santa Ana, about 3,000 investigators nationwide pay a monthly $25 fee, plus a charge for each on-line search, to access more than 1,800 databases, president Rick Rozar says.

CDB personnel assemble their listings of public and corporate data from various source media. These data sources often are magnetic tape, but sometimes, as in many New York jurisdictions, records are kept on archaic 3-by-5 cards, which require on-site key-stroking, Rozar said.

The 9-year-old company’s most popular databases among investigators are civil court litigation records. “Investigators use these a lot for personal-injury actions, looking for prior injury cases, and also for due-diligence investigations of businesses,” Rozar said.

Many investigators also supplement on-line services by buying certain data, such as nationwide phone directories, on computer CD-ROM drives. According to Gregory Estevane of Professional Investigations in San Diego, a researcher will buy five years of civil court data on microfiche, transfer it to compact discs and sell it to investigators for as much as $1,000. The disadvantage is that the discs, unlike regularly updated computer files, must eventually be replaced with updated ones, Estevane says.

Investigators who access California motorists’ Department of Motor Vehicles address data through on-line services are subject to state audits to ensure that the information is used for legitimate court or insurance purposes.

Database resellers say they use lengthy applications and sometimes on-site office checks to try to ensure the legitimacy of potential subscribers. “No individual is going to get into our system who doesn’t belong there,” Reed claims.

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Reed, who holds seminars for clients to discuss privacy laws and guidelines for handling personal information, resents what he says is a smarmy image of investigators conveyed by Hollywood.

“People tend to look at private investigators as slugs, as portrayed in movies and TV,” he said. “In fact, private investigators save the public . . . money by helping uncover insurance and workers’ compensation fraud. If you had to hire government agencies to do what investigators do, the cost would probably quadruple.”

In the debate over the ethics of releasing personally identifiable information, private investigators are criticized for being of potential assistance to abusive spouses and stalkers.

“My concern with private investigators is that they don’t seem to have any real restriction on who they’ll work for. To some extent they’re hired guns,” says David Beatty of the National Victim Center.

“As long as they’re willing to be paid, they’ll go out and find someone. In cases such as (finding) runaways, they can do good work, but in tracking down victims who are literally fleeing for their lives and trying not to be found, they’re victims’ worst enemies.”

Investigators say the benefits of access to public records outweigh any invasion of privacy.

“It’s easy for a person to say, ‘I don’t want anybody looking up my personal information,’ ” says Eddy McClain, former president of the California Assn. of Licensed Investigators. “But if you ask them, ‘OK, but are you willing to give up your credit cards and the ability to get a home loan?’ they quickly change their mind.”

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Some privacy advocates insist that personal information should be used only for the purposes for which the consumer originally gave it.

Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse at the University of San Diego, fields many calls at her hot line from consumers angry at the intrusive way they’ve been targeted by marketers.

“The big question is, ‘Should we look at any kind of regulation that talks about how personal information in public records is used?’ ” Givens said. “We don’t advocate locking up public records, but it’s time to analyze the wide availability of records and what that means for a person’s privacy. The main reason to have public records is so we, the public, can figure out what the government is doing (with) tax dollars. The sale of public records for uses other than this watchdog function is not in line with the original reason for making public records public.”

Citing the problem of stalkers, victims’ rights groups are at the forefront in the drive to restrict access to DMV and post office address data.

“Clearly, private investigators have developed skills to access information systems in ways that aren’t apparent to the average offender,” said Beatty, referring to a tragedy that continues to dog private investigators: the 1989 handgun murder of Los Angeles actress Rebecca Schaeffer by an obsessed fan. To locate Schaeffer, her assailant hired an investigator, who went to the DMV to provide him with her new address.

Shortly after the murder, California legislators passed a law restricting the release of DMV address data, except to courts, law enforcement agencies and insurance companies. In part through the use of identifying chips in their PCs, licensed investigators who gather DMV address data in their work for such agencies are audited by the state.

Michael Santoni, president of Santoni, Skrifvars & Damerell, was audited earlier this month.

“They come in and see the operation and make sure you’re keeping an adequate log,” Santoni said. “All the employees sign a security agreement.”

In February, private investigators joined journalists in testifying at congressional hearings on a House resolution, the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act of 1993, that would place limits on the release of motorists’ addresses by DMV personnel in all 50 states. It would allow motorists the chance to request that their personal data be withheld from marketers and other private individuals.

McClain testified that investigators should be able to maintain their access to the DMV data. The bill, similar to legislation introduced in October by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), was written “under the premise that it will improve personal privacy, but it penalizes people who use them for lawful purposes,” McClain said.

After those hearings, the resolution was rewritten to provide investigators with access similar to what they now have in California. It passed a House vote Wednesday as an amendment to the combined House and Senate crime bill and is scheduled to come before both houses for a final vote by mid-May.

Last week in California, a bill to restrict public access to voter registration records was approved by the Senate Elections Committee and sent to the Appropriations Committee.

Investigators vow to keep fighting for their right to access public records.

“There are plenty of laws, such as the Fair Credit Reporting Act, already on the books to take care of civil and criminal abuses,” McClain said. “Once you start closing public records, it’s the nose of the camel in the tent. The databases will eventually dry up. You will have a more closed society, like China or Russia.”