A serious industry exists to find things out about private individuals. It serves journalists, plaintiffs' lawyers, business rivals, opposition researchers, divorcing spouses, and the merely curious with money to spend. The industry's methods are increasingly capable, and the cost of a substantial investigation into a private person has fallen significantly over the last decade.
What an investigation of this kind produces is usually not surprising in its individual elements, since the elements are public or commercial records that anyone could in principle access. What is surprising is the speed at which they are assembled, the cross-referencing across jurisdictions, and the quality of the inferences drawn from the combined picture.
The principal who has not been investigated has not been important enough; the principal who has been investigated may not always know about it. The output of an investigation is usually delivered as a private report to the client who commissioned it. The principal sees the consequences (a strategic move by a rival, a reference in a court filing, a precise question from a journalist) without seeing the report.
The work to address this is asymmetric. The principal cannot prevent the investigation. They can ensure that what an investigator would find is what they themselves know is on the record, and they can shape what the assembled picture suggests through the addressable categories of information.
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