Politics

According to Brad Stone’s essay in today’s NY Times, this is the term academics use to describe the inaccessibility of paper-based public records.”

Once upon a time,” Stone writes, “people in search of [criminal records] had to hire private investigators to navigate byzantine courthouses and rudimentary filing or computer systems, and to deal with often grim-faced legal clerks. In a way, the obstacles to getting criminal information maintained a valuable, ignorance-fueled civil peace. Convicts could start fresh after serving their time without strangers knowing their pasts, and there was little risk that unsophisticated researchers could confuse people with identical names.”

No more.

Thanks to sites like CriminalSearches.com, you can now do free (albeit imperfect) criminal background checks on friends, neighbors, prospective employees, and even yourself.

I just gave this a whirl and — whew — came up clean. But there’s a Daniel Pink in Portland, Oregon (younger, shorter, and bearing a different middle initial) who’s apparently a pretty irresponsible driver — and whose sins, alas, are now no longer practically obscure.