Re:How long it will take .. (Score 2, Insightful)

In Westlaw it's called "People Search." Type in a name and some other information, such as what state the person lives in and Westlaw will give you the persons current address, past addresses, social security number, phone numbers, what elections they voted in, pretty much everything. I had a chance to play around with it about a month ago and was able to find all of the above information about myself. I was pretty blown away. You could even find the above info on Congressman and other high ranking government officals.

The problem is that a lot of information that you think is private it not and its already inside a computer somewhere. For instance if you have a listed phone number, your name, phone number, and address is inside a computer, thus it just takes a simple SQL query to retieve all of your past addresses and phone numbers. And of course since you chose to have a listed phone number all of that information is public. It just was a matter of time until Lexis and Westlaw linked all the databases. They are very good at that type of thing. The only way I see to truly protect your identity is to have a really common name.