I had to go back to the article to find the exact passage you were referring to. "Puzzled, Gomez resorted to a resource she taps only rarely: the help of friends at federal agencies, friends for whom she has done favors and who in return are willing to let her check her information against government databases. 'Their databases turn up what we call ‘trace details’ that you can’t get with the databases available to ordinary citizens,' Gomez says: phone numbers, addresses, company and individual names that have in some way been associated."

Depending on the status of the underlying civil recovery action that prompted someone to hire the bounty hunter, there may have been legal grounds for her to have that "access," especially if what she was doing was saying, "Here are some dots that I think connect in this way, can you tell me, yes or no, if this makes any sense?" But, yes, depending on the exact rules involved of what agency, and what the bounty hunter is pursuing in what case, and what was asked and answered, this could be illegal. Or not. It's not entirely sure if anything illegal was done in what was reported in that paragraph. The term "illegal search" has a much more specific meaning in legal language.

I worked for a company that required CJIS(Criminal Justice Information Systems) certification to work on their products. The software dealt with law enforcement so we occasionally had access to live criminal records.

Every year we had to re-certify and one of the major points they emphasized and re-emphasized was that it was a felony to search for anything for a friend or even out of curiosity. You only had a legal right to access and view information if you had a specific reason dealing with a current case.

So, if they let her access any of those databases it was most definitely a felony. But as others have said it could have been public record databases and not something protected under CJIS.

There is a longer discussion on the site's comment section about the legality, and the short version is that she has legal access to the databases since she is a licensed private investigator, which apparently is very easy to get in Texas.

It's unclear to me if those searches are illegal or not.

The guy had a case against him. I thought it was common for law enforcement and bounty hunters to cooperate. It wouldn't be wise to assume otherwise.

Yup. That was weird.

Or not. I suppose.

I was thinking the same thing. Why would she want to advertise this? It almost guarantees that they won't be able to help her in the future.

If you do this kind of job, that is to be expected...

Not at all strange, people have gotten used to being surveilled is all. Maybe she can help find the missing node.js guy as mentioned here:

http://blog.izs.me/post/72990767417/a-member-of-our-communit...

According to Yelp[0], that's not the only illegal part...

This company is run by a bunch of crooks. They towed my legally parked vehicle for no reason from the front of my apartment. I called them to see what was up and after arguing for a while they said, "oops, our mistake." It took them over two hours to bring it back to me. The icing on the cake, when I finally got my vehicle back, it had been damaged!!!! The driver that delivered it back told me to contact their manager. The manager wanted to argue with me, claiming that they didn't damage my vehicle. So now, my vehicle is damaged, my alignment is jacked up AND I missed a day if work because of these predatory towers.

This company needs to be reported to the better business bureau. I wish I had the resources to sue these crooks.

[0] http://www.yelp.com.au/biz/unlimited-recovery-raleigh