What the Colleges Don’t Teach

As in any human endeavor, the devil is in the details. The colleges do a fair job of teaching some useful skills, but they don’t teach about the industry. The colleges teach the skills associated with doing certain tasks within this industry. They don’t teach the skills associated with being successful in this industry.  The two skill sets have very little in common.

This series of articles is about how to come to grips with what they don’t teach in college and how to combine the task knowledge with the business knowledge in the right mix to be successful. Let’s start with definitions that  provide instruction on how one must proceed.

The Autodidact Private Investigator

Autodidact (au·to·di·dact , ȯ-tō-ˈdī-ˌdakt, noun) is a person who has learned a subject without the benefit of a teacher or formal education; a self-taught person.

A private investigator, is a person who can be hired by individuals or groups to undertake investigations.

The details that you must absorb in order to be successful are many. The sum of these details define your level of professionalism. No school will teach you these details. You must learn them through experimentation, experience, and self-directed study.

Self-directed Study

Gaining the task and business knowledge should be approached as a series of projects. Choose a topic, acquire an overview of the topic, then investigate the specific aspects of the topic that are most useful to you.  Following this pattern you can acquire a great deal of useful knowledge in a relatively short period of time. If you can’t do this, then you will not be a successful Private Investigator.

I will deal with a separate subject area in each of the following articles within this series of articles.

I picked an unusual word to search. I searched bunionectomies. It found two documents. Google found over 3500 and the first was a definition of the surgery involved. Google was much better.

I then searched public records and got many good responses that answered questions like “are marriage records public” and “are wills public”. SnappyFingers found about 2800 documents while Google found about 24,000,000! However, in the first 100 Google results you would have found many places to do searches for public records. In SnappyFingers you would have found more useful information about the content of public records.

A search for “Public records in Canada” found only 21 records in SnappyFingers but they were very interesting while Google found only 17 that were in my mind much less useful, depending on what you were interested in.

I think this is an interesting search engine that needs to improve its phrase searching and I hope the size of the database increases quickly.

Where do Private Investigators Come From?

Many people become Private Investigators without a college education, experience, or a clear plan for their new career.  They don’t get any meaningful training from their employers. Often, the employer just wants a warm body to do the work and views them as disposable if they don’t measure-up to some arbitrary standard.

At best, the Private Investigator took a Law Enforcement Administration course or Investigation course at a Canadian community college. These new Investigators usually have unrealistic expectations of remuneration and working conditions. At worst, the new Investigator couldn’t cut it as a pizza delivery driver.

The problem most entry level Investigators face is gaining an understanding of the skills and knowledge that they must progressively acquire to have a profitable career. Few employers or colleges provide this information to illustrate what a progressive career would look like. Fewer still, provide training and career guidance.

I recently spoke to a college instructor of investigation related courses who dismissed this lack of career guidance, saying that it was the employee’s own fault for not understanding the industry and that the employer just had to take what was on offer in the labour market for Investigators. Of course, he had never been a Private Investigator or agency owner. Nevertheless, the callousness and sheer stupidity of his remarks forced me to revisit the topic of training the new Private Investigator.

Now that I have climbed onto this soapbox, a series of articles on this topic will follow.  The next article will outline what the community college programs don’t teach. Then I will move on to how to learn to be a Professional Private Investigator in Canada.

I was asked if I could find anything about a woman that a local PI suspected was a prostitute. My initial search through the prostitution sites was for her description.  I found several that matched her description. The surveillance photos looked very similar to one hooker ad, which didn’t show her face.  Most prostitute’s ads don’t show their faces and easily half of the ads use pictures of models stolen for Web sites, so more work was required.

I then went through the ad carefully and noticed that it had a mailto link. I searched for the email address. It appeared on another sex ad site where a guy was advertising for “girls who like to make money”. This site had a good profile shot of the subject’s face as she kissed the pimp.

Now we know she is a prostitute and we know something about her pimp. We now know the cell phone number she uses. We know her “stage name”. We have copies of her ads. We could easily identify her pimp.

I find it hard to get over pendants who don’t meet a payroll, deal with shareholders, or shifting market forces, who always tell you what you are doing wrong. This inane stuff continues to annoy me — I know it shouldn’t, but for three decades I’ve been hearing the same twaddle. As an example from today’s article:

Perhaps the most surprising finding is that among the troubling incidence of misrepresentation, manipulation, covert surveillance and theft, one of the most common ethical problems in competitive intelligence is the unsolicited discovery of a competitor’s trade secrets.

Theft is a crime, while misrepresentation, manipulation, and covert surveillance may, or may not comprise some part of a crime. Of course no details provided. He just wants us to believe this is SOP in business today. The unsolicited discovery of a competitor’s trade secrets is what Competitive Intelligence is about and he wants to equate that with criminal behaviour.

And he continues in this vein:

Managers in our study repeatedly recounted incidents where sensitive competitor information had been disclosed by customers, suppliers, or disgruntled former employees of their competitors. Sometimes these were not sent purposefully, but were accidentally conveyed by e-mail, or as one corporate lawyer put it, “the mysterious fax problem.” Sometimes, simple eavesdropping of one’s competitors at a trade show or on the plane can reap precious inside information. Quite simply, information insecurity is widespread, and there is no lack of competitors that might be tempted to take advantage.

If somebody sends me useful competitive intel, then I must read it to determine what is to be done about it. If it is obviously stolen, then I must determine my legal position in relationship to possession of this data. If the data was clearly stolen I will not become a receiver of stolen property. The use of the word “eavesdropping” has the connotation that this is criminal or improper. Quite to the contrary, overhearing someone talking about something important to you is not a crime or improper.  If receiving the data is not a crime or tort, then it is mine — finders keepers.

And yet it continues:

Use of competitor information known to be confidential can breach trade secret law and goes against the golden rule of “do unto others as they would do unto you.”

If the competitor releases the information in a public venue, then I would like this author to tell us what law has been breached by the party who receives information. If the competitor release the data in public it is no longer confidential. It doesn’t matter how or why he released the data.

And now we get to the objective of this claptrap:

Perhaps even more of a concern for companies is the revelation that a lack of attention to the ethics of competitive intelligence gathering can result in employees assuming they have tacit approval for an anything goes approach to competitors. This can instil a culture of moral laxity that incrementally takes hold in other practices, roles and functions within the organization. Bottom line: lack of attention to industrial espionage can have repercussions for the entire ethical culture of the organization.

Let me translate: you won’t know the difference between criminal industrial espionage and competitive intelligence unless you read my book (Ethical Challenges in Competitive Intelligence) and hire me at outrageous rates to waste your time on this twaddle, after all, you business people aren’t very smart or moral.

An unauthorized visitor shows up after work hours disguised as a janitor and carrying an iPod…He walks from computer to computer and “slurps” up all of the Microsoft Office files from each system. Within an hour he has acquired 20,000 files from over a dozen workstations…

As the concepts of Project Management are imposed on Investigations, CI, forecasting and planning processes, study of this area of business skill will not only become absolutely necessary for all managers, but also for people like me.

Napoleon on Project Management: Timeless Lessons in Planning, Execution, and Leadership offers an excellent look at the prime components of success and failure as a project manager through a short and very readable review of Napoleon’s greatest achievements and the origins of his ruination. This is the best primer on the subject that I have read.

On Monday, a suspect was nabbed  by police officers and FBI agents outside a Target store in Monroe, Washington, and charged with the hold-up.

ErrorZilla: The standard “server not found” page is useless if you’re looking for a Web site that’s gone AWOL. ErrorZilla adds a series of buttons to the bottom of the standard “Firefox can’t find the server” message, providing instant access to the Wayback machine, Google Cache, Whois lookup, Ping and Trace

A similar add-on, Resurrect Pages, allows you to see dead pages, broken links by searching through five big page cache/mirrors: CoralCDN, Google Cache, Yahoo! Cache, The Internet Archive, and the MSN Cache. Unlike ErrorZilla, this doesn’t offer Whois lookup, Ping and Trace.

The Firefox sidebar is one of the browser’s more useful tools, but least used. It allows you to browse your history and view bookmarks and many add-ons use it as well.

This add-on tool lets you quickly switch among all your sidebar panels, which gives you information about your browser use. It will let you see your entire download history in the sidebar or show all of your add-ons with details about each, or give you information on the current page you’re visiting, and more.

If you don’t use the Firefox sidebar, try this add-on and you might. If you do use it regularly,  then this one will be a keeper.

Download All-in-One Sidebar