Monthly Archive for July, 2011

Operational Risk & Lawfare

Published on July 29, 2011 in Company Research, Competitive Intelligence, Private Investigator, Reputation Management and Risk Management. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Recently, I have been involved in a series of jobs involving Operational Risk.

Operational Risk arises from:

  • inadequate or failed processes and controls,
  • people
  • systems
  • external events
  • contractual obligations
  • compliance issues
  • lawfare

Lawfare is the most interesting aspect of this type of work. Lawfare is a form of asymmetric warfare that is waged via the courts with the intention of damaging the firm. Special interest groups, radicals, and competitors will use this to create financial damage and create ill will towards the targeted company.

The Investigator’s task is usually to identify the funding sources and relationship of the plaintiff to individuals and groups who would benefit from the use of this tactic.

Getting to Know the Neighbourhood — Searching Google Buzz

Published on July 27, 2011 in Search Engines, Search Strategies and Social Sites. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Google Buzz API Search

Any information you see below is visible to anyone on the Internet through normal use of the Google Buzz API. Websites or applications that you authorize might see more. Search using this API at http://zesty.ca/buzz/.

Getting to Know the Neighbourhood — Searching Facebook

Published on July 25, 2011 in Search Engines, Search Strategies and Social Sites. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Facebook Graph API Search

You may search publicly available information on Facebook via their Graph API at http://zesty.ca/facebook/. The Graph API provides access to Facebook objects like people, photos, events etc. and the connections between them like friends, tags, shared content etc. via a uniform and consistent Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) to access the representation. Every object can be accessed using the the URL https://graph.facebook.com/ID, where ID stands for the unique ID for the object in the social graph.

Getting to Know the Neighbourhood – Tracking Discussions

Published on July 22, 2011 in Social Sites. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

User-generated discussions (other than Twitter) are typically not indexed by major search engines, as they are not on static pages.

Samepoint is a search engine for conversations and discussions on blogs and social media sites.  It converts these discussions into web pages, or permalinks, and organizes them within a tag cloud. Enter your search query and subscribe to the RSS feed.

BoardTracker covers over 2.4 million live message boards and discussion groups. Google searches message boards as well,  but this gives better results in my experience. Run your search query and subscribe to the RSS feed for your search. To use this search engine properly you do need to sign-up, but it is worth it.

Division of Powers — Property Rights

Published on July 20, 2011 in Canada, How to Become a Professional Private Investigator, Legislation and Private Investigator. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

The provinces have been granted power over “property and civil rights in the province” in Section 92(13) of  The Constitution Act, 1867.

This division of power forced the Trudeau government to remove the right to private property from the Charter of Rights when the provinces protested its inclusion. The provinces saw this as limiting their ability to tax, expropriate, and exercise control over property ownership. Neither the federal nor provincial governments are under any constitutional obligation to pay fair (or any) compensation for expropriated property. The Constitution Act 1867 and the Charter of Rights do not address this issue. Legislatures are also free to legislate away your ability to use any property for any purpose. Ontario and Quebec will probably try this route to control firearms ownership once the Long Arm Registry is eliminated by the federal government.

This is starting to backfire. Landowner associations and grass-roots movements are starting to form in Ontario and Alberta.  These groups and movements to include property rights into the Charter of Rights will become a prominent feature of the political landscape in years to come.

Blippy

Published on July 11, 2011 in Private Investigator and Social Sites. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Blippy allows its users to connect their bank accounts and credit cards to Blippy “to automatically or manually post your purchases so that your followers may view them.” It also syncs existing e-commerce accounts to Blippy such as iTunes, Netflix, Woot, eBay and more. Blippy will then ‘tweet’ each purchase, where it was purchased, and the cost. Many of the pictures have imbedded geolocation metadata.

Getting to Know the Neighbourhood – Tracking Tweets

Published on July 8, 2011 in Social Sites and Twitter. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Google, Bing, & Twitter

Google and Bing Social have indexed tweets since 2009. You may also install greasemonkey and a script to put Twitter results on your Google search results page.

Twitter & RSS

Go to Twitter Search, run a search query, click the “Feed for this query” link next to the orange RSS button, and paste the URL into Google Reader. All tweets  for your search will be stored for you.

The “Advanced Search” allows you to set more specific parameters for your search. You can even specify whether you want to see positive or negative tweets, or tweets that ask a question.

Getting to Know the Neighbourhood – Wikipedia Changes

Published on July 6, 2011 in Social Sites. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Tracking Wikipedia Changes

Wikipedia has become a source of information for millions, but it is not without its problems. Vandalism occurs, and many authors think they know much more about a topic than they truly do. Many authors have political or commercial agendas that they build into Wikipedia articles. As most of the authors are anonymous or pseudonymous, it is difficult to evaluate the content of an individual article.

Researchers and Investigators must often monitor how political or commercial agendas are expressed in Wikipedia articles. Once you have found an article that is of concern, select the “History” tab above the article, then on the left sidebar click the “Atom” RSS badge under “Toolbox” (Atom is a type of RSS feed). Paste the URL into Google Reader. Repeat this for every article that you need to monitor.

You may do the same for the Discussion tab by going to the Discussion tab and onto its own History tab, where you can select the Atom feed for changes to the Discussion.