|
The Infotoday blog summarizes what Brooks Jackson of FactCheck.org had to say at a conference:
- Look for expert agreement
- Check primary sources
- Know what counts (with statistics)
- Know who is talking (consider the source)
- Cross check everything that matters
Out-Of-The-Box Lawyering notes that "there’s a lot of hidden information in digital photos":
You’ve probably learned about all the metadata that can be found in word processing files. The metadata may show when a document was created, what editing changes were made, and all sorts of other potentially valuable information.
I recently learned that there is also some extremely valuable information hidden away in the digital version of digital photographs. And Microsoft has a free – that’s free – program that allows you to discover from the digital version such information as the date and time when the photo was taken.
I'm amused that once Mike Huckabee became the front runner in the Iowa Republican caucuses, he took to using the phrase "dumpster diving" to describe the research his opponents were doing on him. Here's how Huckabee said it last month on Larry King Live:
Dumpster diving is typically used to describe how the down-and-out and the excessively thrifty sift through others' trash in the hunt for useful and edible things. The former Arkansas governor, however, was invoking its less well-known use as an investigative tool.There's a lot of political dumpster diving that goes on in the campaign. There are people from campaigns going back to my hometown of Hope. They're all over Little Rock. They're looking for any dirt they can find. And usually they'll find it.
Police and private detectives have long seized the trash of the unwitting to gather evidence. Old bank bills, letters, receipts found between the banana peels and snot rags are all manna to the investigator on the hunt for clues. Even better, you don't need a search warrant.
The New York Times reported recently that dumpster diving played a crucial role in exposing Balco's role in the steroid scandal. CBS News has called it a tool for corporate spies. Computer Weekly says it's a way to screen new IT staff. Oracle's CEO once defended using it to gather information on Microsoft. Procter & Gamble has acknowledged its hired hands once picked through the rubbish of Unilever, a hair-care product rival. A magazine for trial lawyers has even recommended it as a strategy in trade disputes.
All draw sanction from a 1988 U.S. Supreme Court case, California v. Greenwood, in which six justices ruled that the police did not violate a defendant's constitutional rights by secretly taking his trash from the curb in front of his house. The police used it to charge him and a friend with drug crimes. The justices opined:
Two dissenting justices had a different view:It is common knowledge that plastic garbage bags left along a public street are readily accessible to animals, children, scavengers, snoops, and other members of the public. Moreover, respondents placed their refuse at the curb for the express purpose of conveying it to a third party, the trash collector, who might himself have sorted through it or permitted others, such as the police, to do so. The police cannot reasonably be expected to avert their eyes from evidence of criminal activity that could have been observed by any member of the public.
Scrutiny of another's trash is contrary to commonly accepted notions of civilized behavior.
I don't know that any of Huckabee's opponents have actually sorted through his trash. I haven't read of any evidence of that, nor read of any proof offered by Huckabee. Huckabee, however, is certainly playing off the outrage that would ensue if they did. Otherwise, why not call it "in-depth investigation" or "opposition research" or some other more neutral term? Huckabee's implying that there's something unsavory about researching his past, whereas its seems like a perfectly reasonable strategy to me when the presidency of the United States is at stake.
Reporters, naturally, have also yielded to the temptations of the dumpster.
Investigative reporter Jack Anderson's associates once acquired J. Edgard Hoover's trash, so reported Time magazine, and "confirmed that he liked to drink Jack Daniels." Mark Feldstein, a former Anderson intern, wrote in the Washington Monthly that Anderson "rifled through Hoover's trash (including his dog's feces), largely because Anderson thought Hoover had gotten too powerful and needed to be put in his place."
A footnote in California v. Greenwood referred to a 1975 incident in which "a reporter for a weekly tabloid seized five bags of garbage from the sidewalk outside the home of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger." That reporter, Jay Gourley, who once wrote for the Kentucky Post and at the time worked for the National Enquirer, got other journalists clucking. Here's Howard Flieger in the July 28, 1975 issue of U.S. News and World Report:
To go combing through the junk of any household in search of private - and irrelevant - remnants of a family's living habits is just about as far removed from serious investigative pursuits as it is possible to get.
It makes anyone who has devoted a lifetime to journalism, and regards it as a vital and honorable service to public enlightenment, want to get into a hot tub and scrub with a strong soap until it hurts.
My favorite incident, though, involved Portland's Willamette Week. Outraged that the Portland police brought charges against a fellow police officer based on evidence they found in her trash, reporters for the alternative newsweekly went out and grabbed the trash of the district attorney, police chief and mayor. They wrote that they wanted to "make a point about how invasive a 'garbage pull' really is--and to highlight the government's ongoing erosion of people's privacy":
Maybe so, if it's the difference between winning or losing in New Hampshire.There is something about poking through someone else's garbage that makes you feel dirty, and it's not just the stench and the flies. Scrap by scrap, we are reverse-engineering a grimy portrait of another human being, reconstituting an identity from his discards, probing into stuff that is absolutely, positively none of our damn business.
It's one thing to revel in the hallowed tradition of muckraking. It's another to get down on your hands and knees and nose through wads of someone else's Kleenex. Is this why our parents sent us to college? So we could paw through orange peels and ice-cream tubs and half-eaten loaves of bread?
... the article begins:
At Malbrough & Lirette in Houma, La., a secretary browses MySpace and Facebook Web sites each day.
She's not checking the online social networking sites for personal reasons; she is performing one of her job duties.
"It's an everyday occasion," said Joan Malbrough, a partner at the three-attorney firm, which handles family law, personal injury and corporate law matters. "Every new client we do a MySpace and Facebook search on to see if they or their spouse have any useful information."
In one case, Malbrough said she helped secure shared custody for the father after finding his wife had posted sexually explicit comments on her boyfriend's MySpace page. In another case, a husband's credibility was questioned because, on his MySpace page, he said he was single and looking.
Lawyers in civil and criminal cases are increasingly finding that social networking sites can contain treasure chests of information for their cases. Armed with printouts from sites such as Facebook and MySpace, attorneys have used pictures, comments and connections from these sites as powerful evidence in the courtroom.
A CalTech graduate student has created a site, WikiScanner, that reveals organizations where employees have made anonymous edits of Wikipedia, Wired reports:
On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.
In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case.
Other organizations fingered include the CIA, Microsoft and Congress. The site appears to be struggling with the attention it's already generated, because I tried entering The Courier-Journal in the search box and it churned away for several minutes before telling me it could find no anonymous edits by anyone from our newspaper.
A reader, Valdis Krebs, who discovered this blog because of a recent post of mine about social network analysis, pointed me to a paper he published in 2002 on"Uncloaking Terrorist Networks." As he said in his email, it's an example of "A non- journalist doing computer-assisted reporting":
We were all shocked by the tragic events of September 11, 2001. In the non-stop stream of news and analysis one phrase was continuously repeated - "terrorist network." Everyone talked about this concept, and described it as amorphous, invisible, resilient, and dispersed. But no one could produce a visual. Being a consultant and researcher in organizational networks, I set out to map this network of terrorist cells that had so affected all of our lives. My aim was to uncover network patterns that would reveal Al Qaeda's preferred methods of stealth organization. If we know what patterns of organization they prefer, we may know what to look for as we search them out in countries across the world.
His data sources were newspapers like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and LA Times, so it's a technique within reach of all of us. He also includes a list of other public data sources that can be used for doing this kind of analysis. "In my data search I came across many news accounts where one agency, or country, had data that another would have found very useful," he wrote in the paper. "To win this fight against terrorism it appears that the good guys have to build a better information and knowledge sharing network than the bad guys."
Way back when, if you wanted to find out where someone worked and where they went to school, who their friends were, what their hobbies were and what kind of music they liked to listen to, you had to knock on a lot of doors, make numerous phone calls, dig through city directories, stitch together documents or sit them down for a long interview. Now people volunteer all of that and more on social networking sites such as MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, Friendster and Bebo.
A social networking site is any site that attempts to make it easier for like-minded people to find each other. You typically share personal and professional details about yourself in online profiles, and link to and chat with others who share the same interests or the same circle of friends. There are countless such sites with millions of registered users.
If you think it's just teenagers, think again. There are at least three
such sites for doctors, for example, and many more for patients. There are sites for political activists, music fans and people who like to bake. When I searched MySpace for Frankfort, KY, I found multiple pages for people who said they worked for state government. Even politicians now feel obligated to join.
Journalists are mining these sites for sources and stories. Virginia Tech students, for example, wrote about the massacre on LiveJournal and other sites, provoking a virtual feeding frenzy by reporters covering the story. Social networking sites have led to stories about a convicted sex offender from New York chatting up children online, Kentucky kids charged with burglary after sharing a video of a break-in and a Houston police officer who thought it humorous to share photos of dismembered women.
If you haven't already, someday soon you will want to find someone on one of these sites. Here are some ways to do that:
Better than white pages, Wink free people search lets you find people at social networks like MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn & Friendster, and other online communities. Includes name search plus location, school, work, interests, and more.
yoName turns your computer into a private detective. Look for anyone you want. You can even look them up by a username or an email address! If they're on any of the big-time networks like MySpace or Facebook, yoName will find them. Look up friends, family, ex-es. Look up yourself and see if someone's impersonating you. Or just have fun and look up celebrities, even if the first five entries for Paris Hilton are all "male, 39, single, in Madison, Wisconsin".
ProfileLinker is an innovative web utility that allows you to link your social network profiles in one central location. You can also get message alerts from your favorite social networks, get updates on your friends, search for users across several networks, get your horoscope, weather, sports news and more.
Import your email address book and discover which of your friends are on social networks…
Explode is a social search tool that lets you find others online irrespective of which network they are on, as well as those running their own sites and blogs. It is a easy way to make connections, group these connections and interact with them either using your Explode profile or your own space somewhere else.
Discover, rate and share common interests with other communities around the world.
Pipl, a people search engine mentioned here a few days ago, also searches social networking sites.
The usual cautions apply: You can't assume anything you find is true, and you'll have to find verification elsewhere.
Also keep in mind that your snooping may not go unnoticed: If you search for an email address on yoName, for example, the site sends a message to that person telling them that they've been searched, although it doesn't say by who. There's also StalkerTrack, which helps MySpace users monitor people looking at their profiles. That doesn't mean they'll know your name or why you're looking at their page, but even when people write on Web pages accessible to anyone in the world, they persist in believing their words are somehow private.
Whether they remain so is up to you.
Use the site's own search engine. Some sites, like MySpace, use Google as their search provider. Others have their own, home-grown tool. Policies vary from site to site, but typically you have the option of making your profile private, so only people you invite can look at it, or public, so anyone at all is welcome. You may not be able to join some sites and view profiles at all, unless you misrepresent yourself, because they're only for certain classes of people, such as students. Read the site's terms of use and consult the appropriate ethic's policy and your own moral compass before you act.
Use Google or Yahoo's site search. Typing site:myspace .com "Alex Davis" Courier-Journal in Google or Yahoo's search box, for example, will search MySpace for any mentions of Alex Davis and the Courier-Journal. If you try this search, by the way, you'll learn that Alex once trolled MySpace looking for people to talk about a coffeehouse.
Use a site devoted specifically to finding people on social networking sites. Here are some and how they describe themselves:
Salon relays the story of how the 8-year-old son of a political scientist uncovered secret documents from the Coalition Provisional Authority, the defunct U.S.-led transitional government in Iraq:
My son made his discovery while impatiently waiting to play a computer game on my laptop. As part of a research project, I had downloaded 45 documents from a section of the CPA Web site known as Consolidated Weekly Reports. All but three of the documents were Microsoft Word. I had one of the Word documents up on my screen when my son starting toying with the computer mouse. Somehow, inadvertently, he managed to pull down the "View" menu at the top of the screen and select the "Mark up" option. If you are in a Word document where "Track changes" has been turned on, hitting "Mark up" will reveal all the deletions and insertions ever made in the document, complete with times, dates and (sometimes) the initials of the editors. When my son did it, all the deleted passages in a document with the innocuous name "Administrator's Weekly Economic Report" suddenly appeared in blue and purple. It was the electronic equivalent of seeing every draft of an author's paper manuscript and all the penciled changes made by the editors. I soon figured out that with a few keystrokes I could see the deleted passages in 20 of the 42 Word documents I'd downloaded. For an academic like myself it was a small treasure trove, and after I'd stopped hooting and hollering it took some time before I could convince my startled son that he hadn't done anything wrong.
Maybe the CPA should have read Microsoft's advice on how to prevent this sort of thing.
An editor called me yesterday and asked, Didn't you once write that it's possible to track an airplane in flight? Yes, in fact, I did. The editor wanted to know if I could see where Larry Birkhead and his daughter, Dannielynn, were after taking off from Nassau in the Bahamas. (Non-Louisville readers of this blog should know that Birkhead is from Louisville and met Anna Nicole Smith at a particularly posh and celebrity-studded Kentucky Derby party here known as the Barnstable Brown Gala). We were too late, because Birkhead's plane, also carrying a crew from Access Hollywood, had already landed in Louisville. Ah well, fame is so fleeting ...
A writer on Blogcritics last month wrote about using MySpace to find long-lost friends and acquaintances:
While high school and college students might typically use MySpace to hook up with other members or post photos of the latest frat party, many older users have come to realize that MySpace is an invaluable method for tracking down long lost acquaintances. Childhood friends, college roommates, high school pals, and first loves might all have MySpace profiles just waiting to be discovered.
In the same way, it is potentially a useful tool for reporters looking for people too.
The San Francisco Bay Guardian explores how metadata has become a public records issue there:
Metadata entered the realm of public discussion in San Francisco after citizens started making requests of electronic documents with a specific plea for metadata. Activists Allen Grossman and Kimo Crossman wanted copies of, ironically enough, the city's Sunshine Ordinance, in its original Microsoft Word format. Grossman and Crossman wanted to use the advantages of technology to follow the evolving amendments the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force members were considering for the city's public records law. These "tracked changes" are a common function in Word, and are, technically, metadata.
Headers contain a wealth of information about your email. They tell you which machines handled your message, and how long they took to send it to you. They can tell you who sent the message, and who it was destined for. However, headers can be misleading. It is fairly simple to write fake headers, which obscure information about the sender, recipient, and the machines that handled the mail.
Spammers frequently use fake headers to confuse the people they spam. And because so few people know how to read headers, it often works. A working knowledge of email headers can help you track spam to its source, which makes it easier to stop spammers in their tracks.
Sometimes a fraudulent business will use an address that looks legitimate because it has a suite number and street name but in fact it's just a rented post office box at a UPS Store or other mail drop. This student financial aid site offers a search form you can use to see if an address matches a mail drop. As the site notes: "A mail drop address alone should not be considered confirmation of a scam, because legitimate firms sometimes use such mail boxes. But the fact of a mail drop address, together with other warning signs, can be a useful indicator of an operation's questionable legitimacy."
San Bernardino, Calif., sheriff detectives search for gang members on MySpace.
A Wired reporter used Perl and MySQL to identify 755 sex offenders with MySpace profiles, including one who was eventually arrested after allegedly chatting up teenage boys. The reporter, Kevin Poulsen, did it by scraping the Department of Justice's sex offender Web site and matching the names there against MySpace profiles. He's also released his code in the public domain.
The Raleigh News & Observer reports that a University of North Carolina professor, Scott Madry, is using Google Earth to spot archaeological ruins in France:
... Madry got out his laptop, fired up Google Earth and looked over lands in Burgundy near his research area. Google Earth displays that area in particularly good resolution. Immediately he spotted features that, to his trained eye, resembled outlines of Iron Age, Bronze Age, ancient Roman and medieval residences, forts, roads and monuments.
"I've spent 25 years in this region of France," Madry said. "In the whole time, I've found a handful of archaeological sites. I found more in the first five, six, seven hours than I've found in years of traditional field surveys and aerial archaeology."
The Public Records & Investigation Blog explains bankruptcy records. (For some reason this post is blank in my version of Firefox, but displays fine in Internet Explorer)
A Wired.com blogger claims a standard Windows software tool, tracert, shows the NSA tapping Internet traffic (that's assuming what's been publicly reported about secret "AT&T spy rooms" is true.) For the record, when I use the tool from home, it shows my traffic going through AT&T switches.
The Orange County Register used social network analysis software called UCINET and Macromedia Flash to illustrate the connections between charity fundraisers and an imprisoned telemarketing fraudster.
