In Canada, only one incorporating jurisdiction allows a search by officer or director name. Uncovering a person’s corporate affiliations in Canada is difficult.
The Investigator must embark upon an involved search strategy using a variety of database aggregators, the Internet, and a few public record sources. After conducting all these searches, the Investigator will never be certain that he has found everything.
Doing this type of research is dependent upon the Investigator’s understanding of the sources’ content and how to connect the data to the objectives of the investigation.
The Investigator must know how to search directory databases, commercial credit reports, news and journal databases, insider filings, statistical data, court records, lien filings, and much more to reveal corporate affiliations in Canada.
I often see the following terminology misused in the press. For the Investigator, these terms have very specific meanings. The Investigator must also recognise that most laymen will misuse these terms.
A parent company controls separately incorporated firms. The controlled company is a subsidiary. A subsidiary has a parent when the controlling firm owns more than 50% of its shares.
Divisions are business names owned by a corporation. A division specialises in some product or service offered by the company that owns the business name. A corporation using a registered business name is doing business as that name, hence the term DBA (Doing Business As).
An affiliate is a corporation which is owned by more that one entity which do not individually own more that 50% each.
You just had to ask how I found it. Now look, you may be the client but it’s a secret — their secret that is.
Do a Google search for “not for distribution” confidential and look at all the stuff you find. Now try “not for distribution” confidential site:microsoft.com and look at what you find. Now if you were to try this on the subject company’s web site….
Web-based documents are neither confidential nor private, but they might be a secrets in plain sight.
I found a Competitive Intelligence Blog with an interesting perspective. It is written by a French educated Guy Gweth. He is the manager of GwethMarshall Consulting, specializing in Competitive Intelligence & Public Affairs in central Africa and specifically Cameroun, Congo, Gabon, Guinea Equatorial, RCA & DRC.
The Blog is entitled Competitive Intelligence in Central Africa.
Google Synonym search
If you want to search not only for your search term but also for its synonyms, place the tilde sign (”~”) immediately in front of your search term. For example, ~fraud~facts
Now you know why I find stuff you don’t.
Google Domain search
You can use Google to search only within one specific website by entering the search terms you’re looking for, followed by the word “site” and a colon followed by the domain name. For example: “service pack” site:microsoft.com
Never ask me how I found it again.
Google’s numeric range search (Numrange Search)
Numrange searches for results containing numbers in a given range. Just add two numbers, separated by two periods, with no spaces, into the search box along with your search terms. You can use Numrange to set ranges for everything from dates ( Willie Mays 1950..1960) to weights (5000..10000 kg truck). But be sure to specify a unit of measurement or some other indicator of what the number range represents.
Now you know how to identify stuff about someone’s dead father. Too bad it doesn’t work for Junior very often.
iSEEK is a clustering meta-search site. It covers Ask, Yahoo, Goggle, MSN, and its own database. I like its coverage. I’m not too keen on a particular navigation feature.
When you select one of the topics in the left-hand panel you loose the hits in many other topics. You have to click on the topic again to regain the other hits.
Otherwise this is a very good meta-search with excellent clustering.
The US authorities demand that everybody entering their country have a passport and identity documents compliant with their security standards, but when it comes to their own passports, they have a much lower security standard than they demand of other countries.
The blank passports travel to Europe where a microchip is inserted in the back cover and then onto Thailand where they are fitted with a radio antenna. The Netherlands company that makes the covers for the passport said in October that China stole the technology for the microchips, the Times said.
The Government Printing Office’s decision to export the work has proved lucrative, allowing the agency to book more than $100 million in recent profits by charging the State Department more money for blank passports than it actually costs to make them, according to interviews with federal officials and documents obtained by The Times.
This news story about the apprehension of a man who had child porn on his laptop illustrates how the data on your laptop could be compromised during a border crossing. The actions of this border guard appear to benefit society in this instance.
Texas man arrested at Ottawa airport for child porn faces up to 30 years
The Ottawa Citizen, Published: Sunday, March 23, 2008
The officer asked if he had anything prohibited on his computer and Mr. Moore said he didn’t, but that his brother also used the laptop. When the computer underwent secondary screening, the child pornography files were discovered, and Canadian officials arrested Mr. Moore. He was later transferred to Texas.
When I was traveling and crossing borders frequently, only once did a border guard look at the papers I was carrying. Today, the same border guard is much more likely to probe my laptop.
For the business traveller, this poses significant risk, as the person examining his mobile computer and other electronic devices will either be incompetent or very knowledgeable. The border officials may also have motives for the search that are unrelated to their primary purpose. Each circumstance creates its own risk for the traveller.
Britain drove the Industrial Revolution with a strategy of learning by experience. The age of science that followed was driven by formal education in abstract and theoretical knowledge that could be applied to many applications. The conditions and environment created by formal education produced the concept of competitive intelligence through the publication of scientific journals and the creation of the mass media.
Industrial espionage arises where the published data is non-existent or beyond the experience of those seeking to reproduce the success of others. They need somebody to show them how to put the pieces together. Sometimes, only people with hands-on experience can pass-on the knowledge.
For example, after 1916 France was desperate for field guns. They gave the USA blueprints for their 75mm gun, which was the best in the world at the time. It was so well designed that a glass of water placed on the carriage would go undisturbed as the gun fired. The Americans could not produce usable copies of the gun until French workers arrived to show them how to properly produce the gun.
After WWI, Germany’s lead in chemistry could not be exploited by the victorious allies, even with the confiscated patents and other documents. The Americans needed German chemists to show them how to make it all work. They got this expertise in the 20’s by hiring away the needed German chemists.
In earlier times, industrial espionage was the preferred method of gathering knowledge and building experience as published data was almost non-existent and experience was limited. Competitive intelligence works when you have the hands-on experience to do something constructive with collected and analysed data.
As an Investigator you may have wished you had pictures of that horrible traffic accident you’re investigating. Have you ever thought to look in Google. That’s right, Google.
Ever since Google made satellite imagery available, everybody thinks it is only for finding a good restaurant. But when you think of it, the satellite takes pictures of what is happening when it flies over. For example, a truck crash (Google Earth coordinates 46.765669,-100.79274) outside of Bismarck, North Dakota.
An example of how far this can be taken is All Aircraft in Flight where more than 3300 images of planes in flight are identified. Or there is the Mirage fighter jet in a parking lot (Google Earth coordinates 48.825183,2.1985795) near Paris for those interested in the parking problems in France.
Check-out the Google Earth Communities site for more interesting stuff about Google Earth and its imagery.
This might seem like an opus on dieting, but it isn’t. It is drawn from my experience over the last few years of getting older, less active, and of eating too much.
Calorie counting
After a certain age your body uses the calories you take in at a slower rate. You gain weight. You slow down. This is normal. However, this fact becomes a problem if you gain too much weight.
The solution might seem obvious — stop eating so much. Most of the fad diets don’t work. Eating fewer calories and being active does. Most diets rely on eliminating the calories from either carbohydrates or fat. A normal diet should consist of 1/3 protein, 1/3 carbs, and 1/3 fat calories. These diets eliminate 1/3 of the calories taken in by eliminating 1/3 of the nutrients you need. That is not healthy.
Most people in the industrial west add about 1 pound per year after age 25. This is a result of taking in too many calories, regardless of the source, and too little exercise. The weight gain comes from the calories in carbs and fat. To reduce your weight you have to reduce the calories you take in and burn off more calories than you take in. These facts are self evident until you try to loose weight (as we all know). Food is everywhere, its so easy to overeat. And how do you count calories anyway? Continue reading ‘The World’s Most Dangerous Sit-Down Job III’
Low Profile Search Engine
Ixquick.com professes to delete its users’ search data (including IP addresses) within 48 hours. Furthermore, Ixquick does not set any uniquely identifying cookies or share your privacy details with 3rd parties.
Meta-Search
Ixquick has the normal syntax options available in most of the large search engines. As a meta-search it searches:
- All the Web
- Ask/Teoma
- CNN Search
- EntireWeb
- Exalead
- Gigablast
- MSN
- NBC
- Open Directory
- Qkport
- Wikipedia
- Winzy
- Yahoo
I didn’t get good results searching for images and telephone numbers using Ixquick as I get in other search engines, but the meta-search works quite well. However, you don’t know how many results are chosen from each search engine to make-up the results you see in Ixquick, but this is true with other meta-search sites.
Experian to Track Internet Users
James Ashton writes on The Times Online:
Experian, the credit checking company, is braving mounting concerns over internet privacy with plans to launch a service that will track broad-band users’ activity so they can be targeted with advertising.
Through Hitwise, the web-site company it acquired for £120m a year ago, Experian has held talks with internet service providers to sell its monitoring technology.
Observers expect it to compete in part with Phorm, an AIM-listed company that has stirred controversy after being recruited by BT, TalkTalk and Virgin Media to track their 10m customers’ behaviour so they can be sent advertising messages on the websites they are looking at.
However, the key difference is that Hitwise, which describes itself as an “online competitive intelligence service” would play little part in dispatching the advertising to web pages itself, something that Phorm does through its Open Internet Exchange.
After doing address searches, search for references to the person’s or company’s telephone and fax numbers.
In D&B, you may find a person used his personal telephone or fax number for a small business.
In Google, leave out parenthesis and other separators. The number should appear as 123 456 7890. Google will then return anything that appears where the space was located. If you include separators they will be ignored and anything that appears in their place will not be returned in the results. Do the search without quotation marks first, then do it as a phrase search with quotation marks.
You should search for references to fax numbers in the same manner. If you find several companies or people using the same fax number, then you have some type of relationship. In my experience, many frauds begin with a front company or phony business that uses the same fax number as several such businesses.