A private detective is the defense attorneys equivalent to a prosecuting attorneys ability to direct police detectives to investigate and gather information against you. A private detective is your only chance for a fair trial. As such a private detective has to have many of the powers that a police detective has. If a private detective does not have these powers justice will not be served. In my short experience as a detective the most dishonest people I encountered were -- prosecuting attorneys. Without the ability to double check a prosecuting attorneys data, defendants will never get a fair trial. Like it or not, and I don't like it, a private detective has to be able to do these things because we let police detectives do these things.
As a detective I had to get regular training to continue to be certified. In that training I was taught a lot of interesting methods. The phone companies will sell accounts where you can change your ID and where you can hide your data while capturing all of the data on a location when they call you or answer the phone. So, for a yearly fee you can appear to be a hospital or a movie company and change it whenever you want. You can "get a wrong number" and know right where someone is.
As a detective I was not allowed to impersonate an officer or government official. Apart from that I was encouraged to lie, lie, lie. The reason you need to shut up and get an attorney is very simple. The police are trained to lie, lie, lie. The police are trained to tell you false things about what you are accused of and to take your simplest answers and be able to prove anything they want with them. From the very roots of our justice system, dishonesty is carefully taught to our providers of justice.
So here is the problem. We need private detectives to have the same resources as police or there is no justice. If we have police allowed to use invasive tools, we must have private detectives with invasive tools. Every single time we give more power and latitude to police, we reduce our privacy and our personal security. Every time we decide to be tough on crime we give more power to people that we have trained to lie.
You may have not realized it but right now you are a suspect. If you do anything unusual you will become an interesting suspect. Your data is being collected and if it matches up with any criteria on a list somewhere, even more of your data will be captured.
Meanwhile, corporations can hire detectives and have them investigate for them. Corporations have access to all of these tools and they are using them for their personal gain and to destroy people who are in their way. A mobster or a Russian agent can also hire a detective. They can even set up a shell company to own another company and name it something really nifty while having an employee look up all sorts of stuff on you.
The root of this problem is that we have allowed our government to have these powers. We have let politicians who are bought by corporations to appear to be tough on crime while taking away our personal freedoms. As long as we allow the government such exception to our rights as citizens, we will continue to have to allow private detectives, i.e. bounty hunters, security services and the like much more power than they should have.
A lot of folk are silly enough to think they can be strong on crime while being against big government. Tough on crime means big prisons, big invasions of privacy and arbitrary powers invested in government.
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