Tag Archive for 'Sources'

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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.

Brand Name Search

Published on January 5, 2009 in Search Engines, Search Strategies and Sources. 6 Comments Tags: , , .

Thanks to Wendy Golman Sherer for telling me about this very useful search:

Findownerssearch allows you to:

  • Find the owner of a brand name
  • Find all the brands owned by an individual or company
  • Find brands in a given area/category

    Information on Legislation Before the Canadian Parliament

    Published on December 12, 2008 in Canada, Legislation and Sources. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

    The Library of Parliament announced enhancements to LEGISINFO, a research site containing information on legislation currently before Parliament.

    Effective immediately, users may:

    • consult short summaries of 500 words or less for Government bills from the current Parliament onwards. These summaries are placed under the Legislative Summary link within 48-72 hours of first reading;
    • and access “Royal Recommendations” and “Major Speaker’s Rulings and Statements” for all bills from the 40th Parliament onwards, where applicable, through the links to the Senate Debates or House of Commons Journals. These links are found just below “Text of the Bill”.

    LEGISINFO also provides access to information about individual bills, along with links to recent newspaper articles, a reading list, and other related information.

    A Picture Isn’t Worth What It Once Was

    Published on November 28, 2008 in Methods, Private Investigator, Search Engines, Social Sites and Sources. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

    I’m taking a new image search engine for a test drive. This thing takes a picture and compares it to images that it has indexed. Instead of indexing words, it indexes the picture by applying a sophisticated pattern recognition algorithm to each image and then it indexes the result. Given an image to search for, TinEye tells you where and how that image appears all over the web—even if it has been modified.

    This tool has quite a few uses. If you find a picture of a subject, use TinEye to see where the picture might reappear. This can lead to more useful information about the subject. Any sites about the subject or owned by the subject get the same treatment if the site has images. I’m surprised what I sometimes find doing this.

    The database is small in comparison to the vast number of images available on the Internet. However, I have found that this thing works very well.

    Tweet by Tweet – Mumbai

    Published on November 26, 2008 in News, Social Sites, Sources, Terrorism and Twitter. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

    Twitter news about the terrorist attacks every few seconds, at Mumbai, Bombay, #Mumbai, and @BreakingNewz.

    The Wikipedia page about these attacks features a picture of a gun-toting attackers and is becomining the clearing house for information about the attacks just as it did for the Virginia Tech shooting. In the Virgina Tech shooting over 8000 amendments to the Wikipedia article were posted in 2 weeks.

    Twitter and Maritime Disasters

    Published on October 30, 2008 in Competitive Intelligence, Search Engines, Search Strategies, Social Sites, Sources and Twitter. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

    Loose Lips Sink Competitors

    Competisaurus has just let the world know my secret techniques for predicting maritime disasters. Twitter Search is like sitting in a dockside bar listening to enemy sailors plot some dastardly attack. If you understand that competitive intelligence isn’t a guessing game like Battleship, then searching Twitter might help your marketing salvo sink a competitor’s Battleship. Now keep this to yourself, let it be our little secret.

    The Twitter Threat

    On the other hand, landlubbers at US Army intelligence wrote a report on the Twitter-threat. The report postulates that Twitter could be used for coordinating terrorist attacks. The report supposedly states, “Twitter was recently used as a counter-surveillance, command and control, and movement tool by activists at the Republican National Convention,”. “The activists would Tweet each other and their Twitter pages to add information on what was happening with Law Enforcement near real time.”

    Must we tweet this Twitter-threat stuff seriously?

    Finding Usernames

    Published on October 8, 2008 in Search Engines, Search Strategies, Social Sites and Sources. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

    Userrnamecheck  goes through many common social sites and searches for a particular handle or username. To make this site work you may need to use IE rather than Firefox.

    Spokeo is a web tool that searches boards, conversations, social network sites, and forums. Unlike other people search engines that search for one person at a time, this thing searches for people contained within a your email address book. To do that, you must give them your email address and password for Spokeo to import your address book. Spokeo then looks for social network accounts for each person by performing searches across over 40 such networks. There are reports of this site using your address book to spam your contacts. Also, when you give over your email address and password to a site, you are giving it the authority to act as you. As far as Gmail or other email sever is concerned, there is no difference between the site you just gave your login details to and yourself.

    The way to use this is to create a Gmail account with only one contact — the person you are looking for. Then change the password and delete the account. Another safer alternative is to submit the email address and name you are searching for as a CSV file. Spokeo will confirm the account by email. Once you have done the search, I would eliminate the Gmail account you used because the person you searched will probably receive a “courtesy” email (spam)  saying that someone has Spookeoed him and that he should sign up to learn more. This is Spokeo’s growth strategy.

    However, this thing is effective, but it must be used with great care.

    Copyright as an Asset – Canada

    Published on October 6, 2008 in Canada, Due Diligence, Intellectual Property Rights and Sources. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

    In Canada, one does not have to register your copyright to have protection, but when you register with the Copyright Office, you receive a certificate which can be used to your advantage in the event that your work is infringed. Formal registration of a work is not required. An author or the author’s employer usually enjoys copyright protection automatically on creation of the work.

    Registration of a copyright is done by completing an application and sending it to the Copyright Office. A copy of the work is not sent along with application. Under the Library and Archives of Canada Act, two copies of every book published in Canada, and one copy of every sound recording manufactured in Canada that has some Canadian content must be sent to the National Library and Archives within one week of publication.

    Library and Archives Canada
    Legal Deposit
    395 Wellington Street
    Ottawa ON  K1A 0N4
    Tel.: 819-997-9565
    Fax: 819-953-8508

    When a publication is deposited, a brief description is entered in AMICUS, Library and Archives Canada’s database. They are also catalogued and listed in Canadiana, the national bibliography, which began in 1950 and is widely circulated in Canada.