1) Someone leaked to the L.A. Times that Arnold had fathered a child with a member of his household staff.

2) A list of his female employees was created.

3) Background checks were run on the female employees to identify those with children of ages fitting the relevant timeline. This revealed that Mildred was currently divorced and her son was born on 10/7/1997. The journalist would’ve then dug deeper into Mildred’s background, pulling the boy’s birth certificate and Mildred’s divorce records.

4) The boy’s birth certificate listed the father as the man Mildred Baena was married to at the time. Ok, this seems in line.

5) However, the divorce records revealed that Mildred and her husband separated less than three weeks after her son was born and, contradicting the birth certificate, indicate that the couple had no children. This contradiction, as well as the timing of the separation (likely when Mildred confessed her affair), is a huge red flag and would’ve made Mildred suspect number one.

6) Property records indicate Baena purchased a home last June in Bakersfield, California, about 100 miles from the Schwarzenegger home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles, for $268,000. Journalists then surely descended in droves on Baena’s house.

OK, I promise, no more gold analogies since I don’t want anyone to think I’m a 49ers fan. At the heart of the matter are digital photos, meaning photos that aren’t taken with an old fashioned camera that (the horror) actually uses film. These photos, like most things in the digital world, have a lot of information associated with them, including date taken, type of camera used, photo resolution, file size, etc. Place your cursor over the photo, right click, choose “properties” and then the “details” tab, and voila, that information is there for the taking. This and other data not mentioned is called “Exchangeable Image File Format” (EXIF), and it can be very useful to photographers and others working with digital images.

The problem starts with the fact that for more and more people, their smartphone is also their camera. Unlike cameras, which are oblivious to where the person holding them is when snapping a photo, the smartphones have GPS capability and know exactly where the person holding them is. And remember EXIF? Well, one facet of EXIF is called “geotagging”, which details the exact location of the image when taken. Before smartphones became people’s cameras, the geotagging data went unused but, for folks using smartphones as cameras, the geotagging data is captured in each photo.

Now initially I’d imagine some people thought “so what if my photos have the GPS coordinates in them, it’s not like the whole world sees my photos”. And just a decade ago, that was true. But then came the internet and the Narcissist’s Nirvana, better known as Facebook. And with Facebook, it became possible for everyone who owned a smartphone and who had a hearty ego and/or intense need for attention, to delude themselves into believing that all 879 of their Facebook friends would love to see all 1,000+ photos of their recent trip to WallyWorld. And, depending on the privacy settings selected, it’s likely that many more than someone’s 879 friends can see their photos.

Now why should you be concerned? Off the top of my head, I can think of at least a few worrisome scenarios. For starters, unsavory characters like stalkers and burglars could figure out your home address from photos uploaded to a social networking site. If that’s not bad enough, they could then wait until you’re on vacation or on a business trip (which folks tend to indicate while still away) and rob your empty home.

Now here’s the good news:
1. Many sites strip out the EXIF geotag information when users upload images.
2. One of the sites that does strip out that information is Facebook.
3. While Flickr and Picasa do offer options to download originals of uploaded images, which may include EXIF geotag data, the default option is to keep this information private.
4. Users can deactivate geotagging functionality in their smartphones with these clicks in the settings menu.

So, in a nutshell, there’s no need to panic and immediately delete every photo you ever posted online. Depending on the device used to take photos and the website to which the images were uploaded, geotagging may be a non-issue. But the reality is a lot of information people assume to be inaccessible is actually very easy to find. I never cease to be amazed by how much personal information a total stranger can gather about someone, using only publicly accessible internet resources, with relatively little effort. I always advocate using common sense, and eliminating unnecessary risk whenever possible. While the risk is very small that your house is going to be robbed by someone who sees photos you’re posting to Facebook while still on vacation, I recommend waiting until you get home to post the photos.

I would estimate that 90% of people that call me with infidelity-related cases ask something about reading their spouse’s email, text messages, etc. And typically they are asking if we can assist them by providing them the ability to read these electronic messages. I always tell them the same thing, that while it may sound odd, ridiculous, unfair, etc., it’s most likely illegal for them to do this. Without going into all the case law and legal mumbo jumbo pertaining to this matter, I’ll try to explain when it is ok to read these emails.

Essentially, someone can read their spouse’s email if the email is saved on a shared computer, meaning one which both parties use regularly and are aware that the other spouse uses as well. But while the defendant in this case wishes that was the only requirement, it’s not. The second piece of the puzzle is that the spouse’s email would have to be visible to the other person while they were using the computer in a typical manner. Translation: If the spouse leaves their Outlook Inbox open when the other person jumps onto the family computer, leaving their email in plain view for the world to see, it’s likely legal for someone to read it.

But normal usage of the family computer usually does not include logging into the spouse’s email account. And while Mr. Walker appears to be depending on this for his defense, it’s still most likely illegal even if the spouse leaves their password out in plain view for the world to see. A TV host used a great credit card metaphor for why the password being in plain view isn’t a viable excuse. He correctly stated that even if he left his credit card on his co-host’s desk, so that she had all the information necessary to use it, it would still be a crime if she did use it. People can pretty much assume that if they have to login to their spouse’s email account, it’s illegal.

You’re probably thinking all of the things that I’ve heard argued by spouses on the phone, including it’s their wife/husband, so how can it be illegal to read their email. Or some try the “I paid for the damn computer, so I can read anything I want” rationale. I’ve heard them all, and I agree with most justifications, but my agreement doesn’t make them any less illegal. So in a nutshell, if you have to login to your spouse’s email account in order to read the messages, you better have a notarized authorization from the spouse giving you permission to read their email. Most divorce cases we’ve worked on, or that I’ve ever even heard of, involved someone reading a spouse’s email in what would technically constitute an illegal manner. So if Mr. Walker gets convicted, I predict the wheels of justice will be stopped or slowed to a crawl, since there will be a flood of people charged with the same crime.

Later that day, a friend of Afifi’s named Khaled posted photos of the device on Reddit.com, inquiring whether any readers could identify the device and if it meant “the FBI is after us”. A reader quickly identified the device: the Orion Guardian ST820 tracking device, manufactured by electronics company Cobham and sold only to law enforcement agencies.

As Afifi considered selling the device on Craigslist, his roommate noticed two suspicious people loitering by his car outside. As Afifi got in his car and drove off to run errands, he was quickly approached by two SUV’s with flashing lights and men wearing bullet-proof vests. I’m guessing at this point Afifi envisioned a hood being thrown over his head, after which he’d be whisked off in a Lear Jet to Morocco or some other distant land, where his hosts would provide free entertainment in the form of waterboarding and sleep deprivation. Instead, an agent confronted Afifi, and told him that they were there to collect their GPS tracker, which they could do the easy way or the Rendition way. He chose the easy way, they asked some questions and explained the inspiration for tracking him (largely a red flag-producing blog post by his friend Khaled), and the ordeal was pretty much over.

But this story does bring up a few key concerns that private investigators should consider when employing GPS tracking as a tool in their case work:

1. GPS tracking law is determined at the State level, and each State’s laws often are different. It’s the private investigator’s responsibility to know the law and ensure that the device is being used in accordance with it, because regardless of what the client says or wants, it’s the P.I. who will end up in the clink if the law is broken. In some States, the law is that a GPS tracker can be used only on vehicles owned by or registered to the person who grants the private eye permission via written authorization.

2. While the FBI has the assets and capability to use GPS trackers powered by the car battery, the average private investigator will be using a battery-powered device. And like all things in life, battery-powered GPS trackers involve a tradeoff, namely the size of the unit vs. the duration of the tracking. Some units offer a big waterproof case which can house both the GPS and an extended life battery and claim can be used for up to 30 days. The issue is that the case is fairly large, like a brick sliced in half the long way, which would easily draw the attention of anyone looking underneath the vehicle. The units with a shorter life of up to a week are much smaller, some as small as half the size of a pack of cigarettes. I can offer one piece of advice: For the units that use the AAA batteries, the quality of battery DOES matter, and a high quality battery can dramatically extend the battery life of the unit and, consequently, the length of time it can be left on the car to gather data.

3. Private investigators should ask their clients about any upcoming vehicle maintenance, from oil changes to 60k mile checkups. Since I’d advise the private eye to take a retainer covering the damage to or loss of the GPS for any reason (including discovery by an oil change tech), they shouldn’t have to worry about it being found, in theory. However, even if it’s the client’s fault, because they should have realized the vehicle was scheduled for maintenance on the dates the GPS would be deployed, discovery of the GPS will lead to a VERY unhappy client. Besides having to foot the bill for the lost unit, after gaining no intelligence from it, they’d also have to deal with the fallout from their spouse finding out that they’d had a private eye put a GPS tracker on their car. And that fallout would likely impact the P.I.’s future revenue, since the spouse would consequently limit any suspicious behavior and the client would have less reason and opportunity to retain the private investigator’s services.

Rent control hijinks are infamous in NYC, and there are many stories of tenants who continued to send their monthly rent checks in on time, despite the fact they’d been dead for a decade or more. How does this happen, you might ask? Well the answer is simple: “Grandma Smith” began renting her Greenwich Village apartment in 1969, and has consequently been paying a rent controlled $500 for an apartment which is now worth $2,000 on the rental “free market”. Eventually the “Smith family” had to put “Grandma Smith” in a convalescent home when she began getting lost on her walk back to her apartment from Sunday mass. But the Smith’s realized that Grandma’s rent-controlled apartment was a goldmine, and that they could rent it out to someone else for $1,500 (still a bargain in the non rent-controlled world) and pocket $1,000 a month in the process.

While examples like “Grandma Smith” aren’t the rule, they are far less the exception than you might think. More popular are living tenants who due to a new job, the addition of a bouncing baby boy/girl, or some other urban flight inspiration, move to the suburbs, but want to keep their rent-controlled apartment. These people rent out the apartment to a relative, friend, friend of a friend, or often times unrelated 3rd party, while sometimes living in an entirely different state, but continue to pay the landlord as if they are still living there. Their motivation for doing the extra work of collecting the rent check from the new tenant and sending their rent check to the landlord: the often huge difference between their rent-controlled bargain and their tenant’s rent.

While an investigation into this kind of tenant fraud goes on in both good and bad economic times, the current economic crunch has inspired landlords to more actively monitor their rent-controlled properties. The reason being if they can prove that the tenant on their lease, and/or whose name is on the rent checks they receive, is dead or living in New Jersey, they can evict the actual tenant and the pseudo tenant sending in the rental payments. This is where private investigators enter the picture, as they are retained to prove who exactly is living in their rent controlled apartments. And this particular business has been booming for PI’s working in New York City, as it’s well worth the landlord’s money to pay for evidence of rent control fraud. Once the “rentee” who’s been fraudulently enjoying the benefits of rent control is evicted, the landlord can begin charging a MUCH increased rent from that point forward. These landlords often make up the money they spent on the PI’s they hired within just a few months of the “uncontrolled” rent.

This is an interesting perspective on the subject from The New York Times.