Archive for the 'Sources' Category

Page 3 of 7

Internet Detective School

Published on November 2, 2009 in How to Become a Professional Private Investigator, Methods, Private Investigator, Search Engines, Search Strategies and Sources. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Internet Tracking

Mantracker hunts people by following their spoor for a popular TV show.

On the Internet, Investigators have to do the same thing. However, the digital spoor may be on a computer in Singapore while your prey is in Corner Brook Newfoundland.

For this series of articles, the terms tracking, monitoring, and alerts  all mean the same thing. These terms are applied to methods of collecting new information as it appears in a variety of searches of many sources throughout the Internet.  This is a systematic way of locating information about a subject as it becomes available. These are sources and methods that monitor news reports, social media, blogs, or other open sources of information relevant to your investigation. I will illustrate how to construct the search statement and get the results in your hands on an ongoing basis.

I will start with the large search engines and move onto the lesser know sources and methods.

Real-time Search Engine

Published on September 18, 2009 in Search Engines, Search Strategies and Sources. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Collecta

Collecta claims to provide results in real-time from the Web. Your search results will appear in a constantly-reloading stream — everything from Twitter updates to news and blog articles, and even  Flickr photos.

However, Twitter usually deluges the results. The “Search Options” to the left of the results allows you to select the type of updates you want to see. Leaving the Twitter updates unchecked makes it easier to see the other real-time search results.

Limitations

Like all Meta search engines, it is hard to create a search statement because you’re searching 140-character Tweets, full-text news, and Blog entries. I don’t use this as a starting point. However, it searches a wide variety of places, which makes it good for tracking breaking news.

The 15 Biggest Wikipedia Blunders

Published on September 7, 2009 in News, Reputation Management and Sources. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Wikipedia’s just announced plans to restrict the editing of some of its articles. Under the new system, any changes made to pages of still-living people will have to be approved by an “experienced volunteer” before going online.

The 15 biggest  Wikipedia blunders is a must read for anybody interested in reputation management.

Where did this email come from?

Published on July 8, 2009 in Communication, Methods, Private Investigator and Sources. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

Tracking down the origin of email messages has become a staple of many Private Investigators. Without getting into  mind-numbing technical details, here are the steps I take to find the origin of anonymous email missives.

  1. Search the sender’s email address using Google, Bing, and other search engines to see if it appears. Next search using Intelius’ reverse email lookup.  If the email appears registered to a name, you can pay a fee of $4.95.
  2. Even when a misleading email address is the origin, read the IP addresses in the header from bottom to  top. The IP address in square brackets is the origin IP.  Or, use IP tool to track the IP address. Copy the headers into the box and select your email system.
  3. Go to What Is My IP Address and enter the IP address to see where it originates.
  4. Search the email address using Spokeo.
  5. Try ReadNotify.com and email the anonymous correspondent. If he opens your message, then it will notify you and send back the reader’s IP address, the date and time the message was opened, location of recipient, map of location, apparent email address of opening (if available), referrer details (ie; if accessed via web mail etc), URL clicks, how long the email was read for, how many times your email was opened and if your email was forwarded, or opened on a different computer. If he opens your message in his office, then you will know where he works. However, this seems to only work with HTML enabled email programs. Remember, the header data from the original message will probably tell you what email program sent the message. NOTE: This does not work if the recipient opens the email in the Web version of Gmail. If he receives it in a desktop client that polls Gmail, then it will work.

 

 

CIA World Factbook

Published on July 1, 2009 in Intelligence Services and Sources. 0 Comments Tags: , .

The CIA announced that their World Factbook Web site had been redesigned. I’m not the only person who constantly relies on this — over 3 million visitors access the online Factbook monthly. That’s not surprising as the World Factbook provides information about the background, geography, people, government, economy, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 266 countries and other entities.

I really like the new features of reporting world rankings for data like life expectancy. Another new feature is the “Field Listing” icon that gives you an alphabetical listing of countries for that field so that you can do your own comparison of data that can’t be ranked.

This is a timely resource — it is updated every two weeks and the updates are logged on a special page. Though I wish either the country entries or data fields indicated the last update, but that might be asking too much.

If you want to avoid all the Flash content use the text-only version. I’m not a big fan of Flash, but this is a very well executed use of it that makes the World Factbook more useful.

Web 1.0, 2.0, & 3.0 Expained

Published on June 26, 2009 in Power User Tips and Sources. 0 Comments Tags: , .

How often have you hear the terms Web 2.0, Web 3.0, or semantic web, and realized you don’t even know what Web 1.0 is?  Well, here is the article that explains it all in very few words and some good slide presentations:

Web 3.0 Concepts Explained in Plain English

Chickipedia

Published on June 19, 2009 in Search Engines, Search Strategies and Sources. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

I recently read a news article that mentioned Chickipedia.  I immediately began searching this site. I found porn stars, actresses, athletes, and many more.  If a local paper can find a drunk driver in this thing, maybe I could find the subject of an investigation. I searched using names, city names, and occupations. Every search returned valid results.  Too bad there are only 9,177 ladies profiled on the site. Too bad I didn’t find the subject of an investigation.

Once the Cat’s Out of the Bag

Published on June 5, 2009 in News, News Media, Private Investigator, Reputation Management, Search Strategies and Sources. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

I started with a very interesting article about what you might find in a college newspaper that would be interesting to an investigator.

One thing leads to another and I also found an article about a study of how quickly social sites remove pictures. Some sites take up to 30 days to really get rid of the offending images. This is an important thing to understand if your are looking for derogatory pictures.

Your (journalistic) past can haunt you online

Once the cat is out of the bag, you probably won’t be able to catch her and stuff her back inside…

That (now) embarrassing article you wrote for your college newspaper three years ago? It’s still online. And when people Google you, they find it…

Apparently a lot of student newspapers are receiving requests from former student writers to remove or “hide” (from Google) articles of which they are now ashamed…

…requests by former students who were featured in articles in the student newspaper. Campus police arrests for drunkenness, that sort of thing. They would like those articles to be removed or “hidden.”…

Here’s a related story about someone trying to get an old newspaper story erased from the search engines. Article published in The Seattle Times on Aug. 15, 2008.

Websites keep deleted photos, study shows

Cambridge researchers have shown that photos aren’t always deleted when users ask, causing a major ‘data remanence’ issue for cloud computing.

According to a study of 16 social networking, blogging and photo sharing sites…most of them failed to remove photos after users deleted them…

Handy Internet Gadget

Published on May 18, 2009 in Methods and Sources. 0 Comments Tags: , .

If you are having trouble connecting to something on the Internet, it would be nice to know if anybody else can get to the site you are trying to get to.

Down for everyone or just me? answers this question for you.

Canadian Charities

Published on May 7, 2009 in Canada, Methods, Private Investigator and Sources. 4 Comments Tags: , , .

Researching Canadian charities is a difficult and frustrating undertaking. Here is the short course in starting an investigation of a Canadian charity.

To determine if a charity is registered by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), go to the Charities Listings page. The most useful filing of a charity is the T3010 form. This is the annual information filing that must be completed each year.

I wish that a quick read of a charity’s financial statements or its T3010 annual return or a calculation of its disbursement quota would tell one about the real administration and fund-raising costs and the real effectiveness and importance of a charity’s work. Usually, some research is in order – read the charity’s annual report, review its website, review its T3010 and search on director, donor, and recipient names, it may be enlightening to see the relationships exposed by this type of search. Then, if you have any concerns, call the charity and see what they have to say.

The Globe and Mail each week provides a short profile of a major donor and the charity that received the donation as well as discusses the donor’s motivation in making the donation. This makes searching the charity name in the Globe and Mail worthwhile. Searching The Toronto Star is also a good idea as their reporter, Kevin Donovan, writes about the worst examples of misdeeds by charities in Canada.

I read it on the Internet – it must be true!

Published on March 11, 2009 in Methods and Sources. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

Wikipedia

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.

How Wikipedia Works

If you use Wikipedia, may I suggest that you refer to How Wikipedia Works.  Chapter 4 is titled, Understanding and Evaluating an Article. This is the most useful chapter for professional researchers. If you haven’t used Wikipedia much, may I also suggest reading Chapter 3, entitled Finding Wikipedia’s Content, which is about searching.

Article History

Go to the top of the article and click on the tab marked history for a list of the people who have changed the article. You can compare the changes to see what changed in each version of the article by using the radio buttons. You will often notice that certain “contributors” are really vandals and knaves.

Look at the History and Discussion tabs for the article on the Danish Muhammad cartoon controversy to see how these can be really important. You can quickly tell who not to trust from reading the discussion pages and looking at the history tab content on many articles. For example, look at the contributor RanEagle in the history tab and click on talk.

Sockpuppetry

Mark Schaver writes on the Depth Reporting blog about a site, WikiScanner, that reveals organizations where employees have made anonymous edits of Wikipedia articles.

Google Profiles

Published on February 11, 2009 in Methods, Search Engines, Search Strategies and Sources. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

In December 2008, Google created a centralized profile system that will provide personalized information to all the Google products. These Google Profiles are minimalist things compared to LinkedIn and Facebook. However, they are accessible to search engines for indexing and may appear in search results. This may be Google’s first step into the social network arena as the Google Profiles launch came on the heels the Google Open Social product launch.

These profiles may be searched at the Google Profile search site. I was experimenting with this and found an enormous number of trashy profiles. One can search by name, but the fun starts when one searches by any rude or vulgar term that comes to mind. Of course, one could perform useful searches using company names or names of real people.

Google Street View

Published on January 28, 2009 in Canada, Methods, Search Engines, Search Strategies and Sources. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

During a recent research project, I wanted a picture of a commercial property in downtown San Francisco. It’s always good to take a look at the premises from which a business operates to avoid dealing with a phantom business.

I requested that our agent in San Francisco go there and take a picture. He said it would be less bother to get it from Google Street View. He does that all the time.  As you can see on the map, (Google Street View) this isn’t offered for any Canadian city right now, and if the privacy fanatics have their way it never will. However, in San Francisco, this got me two excellent pictures of the building.

The street addresses served-up by Google are only approximations, so you have to move up and down the street looking for street numbers to get the correct building. To get the pictures into a report use print screen as the images themselves can’t be copied.  Pressing print screen key in MSWindows will capture the entire screen, while pressing the alt key in combination with print screen will capture the currently selected window. Paste the image into the report using the ctl-V combination.

The Commonplace Blog

Published on January 19, 2009 in Methods, Notebooks and Sources. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

The Commonplace Book is a written scrapbook filled with things one learns, but doesn’t want to forget.

The name, commonplace, is a translation of the Latin term, locus communis, which means argument or theme for general application. The theme of my Commonplace Book is the concepts and facts that I have learned and the books I have read.

The Confidential Resource is a modern analog for a Commonplace Book with the theme of Sources & Methods for the Investigator.

Panama Company Register Now Online

Published on January 9, 2009 in Company Research and Sources. 6 Comments Tags: , .

Opening up a tax haven

 Panama recently put online their company registry. You can now retrieve the names of the current directors of every Panamanian company, as well as all the company’s filings themselves (minutes of company meetings, details of shareholdings, ownership, certificates of incorporation etc. etc.).

Nice, but you can only search by the name of the company. If you want to find somebody who is dodging tax or doing something else dubious, you really need to search by director’s name.

This tool fixes that problem. I’ve scraped all 600,000 company records, going back 30 years, and indexed by directors.