private investigations
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Despite what you might have seen on TV, private investigations are not all about hiding in the bushes and getting into gunfights. The job of a private investigator is actually pretty mundane most of the time. I am perhaps the busiest, most successful private investigator Atlanta has to offer, and I still spend a lot of time doing background checks at home. Private investigation does involve a lot of surveillance work, and even occasionally requires you to stake people out and follow them around. For the most part, however, private investigations are pretty tame.
When I first got my private investigators license, I had very unrealistic expectations for the job. As most people who study kung fu grew up watching martial arts movies, so most people involved in private investigations grew up watching film Noir. I expected to be drinking at all hours of the day, talking to beautiful women, fighting it out with tough thugs, and even getting into an occasional gunfight. Perhaps I am overstating the case a little bit. I knew that private investigations weren’t all that dangerous, and most of the stuff that private investigators do in the film noir movies would get you arrested. Nonetheless,I did think private investigations would involve more high drama than they do.
I will give you an example of what a typical private investigation is like. In my last case, I was working for a boss, trying to find out if one of his employees was cheating on his disability benefits. Rather than spending all of the private investigations hunkered down in the bushes, however, I divided my time between doing background research on him and taking photos of his activities.
Private investigators have different styles. I could have gotten more photographic evidence showing that he was doing vigorous physical activity while pretending to have a serious injury. Instead, I used some private investigation tricks to make things easier. I found several records of him running in marathons and participating in sports clubs in the past several months. This meant that I didn’t have to follow him around and risk a potential confrontation. Intelligent private investigations involve very little action. Basically, if you don’t have to follow someone around, you don’t. Otherwise, you could get hurt. Criminal background checks are every bit as important to private investigations as are photos. Personally, I prefer the former over the latter. After all, it is much less work to do the background check.
privacy rights in the workplace
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Of all the workplace issues, privacy rights in the workplace is one of the least easily resolved. In most cases, legislators do their best to really fully explore an issue and come up with clear, decisive rules to govern it. With the right to privacy, however, things have changed so rapidly that the law has not caught up. The real problem is that Congress doesn’t understand electronic privacy very well. The Internet, as a matter of fact, is something that is very baffling to many of our legislators. Deciding on whether e-mails should be private, what laws should govern electronic wiretapping, surveillance, and other means of spying, is something that the government has never fully done.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t any laws governing workplace privacy. Although there is a large gray area, there are many things that clearly violate privacy rights in the workplace. For example, running cameras without the knowledge of the employees is out of the question in many areas. Anything that basically constitute out and out spying is nearly always a violation of workplace privacy rights.
This doesn’t mean that privacy laws are always consistent on the point. For example, the verdict is still out on e-mail privacy. Should your boss be able to check up on your e-mail to make sure that you aren’t doing things that are not work related? No one really knows, and it seems like it might be a few more years before any clear decision is made. The way it looks now, however, it appears that bosses are allowed to make sure that you aren’t doing things not related to work, but aren’t allowed to spy on personal communications.
Privacy rights in the workplace also vary greatly from area to area. In America, we have some great local autonomy, but all of this autonomy comes at a price. With the combination of state, federal, and local laws, it is very difficult to know all of your legal obligations and protections. This is true with regard to privacy rights in the workplace more than anything else. As a private citizen, you simply won’t be able to keep up with all the given legislation. The only real solution is to talk to an expert. If you think that your privacy rights at work have been violated, you really should get involved with a legal privacy advocate. They can tell you what to do next, and help you to protect your rights.
