Do you KnowEm?

Billing itself as a brand protection program, KnowEm allows users to check the availability status of a username across various social networks.  KnowEm currently searches over 340 different social network sites in 15 different categories including blog platforms, photo sharing networks, bookmarking services,  and travel sites to name a few.  For a fee, KnowEm will enroll you with your chosen username at these 300+ sites so you can “Grab your name before someone else does.”  This article from the Washington post provides some insight as to why companies (or even individuals) might want to use this service.

However, KnowEm has one great feature that investigators can take advantage of for free.  Anyone can search for a username and check the availability status of that username across all the sites monitored by KnowEm – completely free and without the need to setup an account.  If you have a known username for the subject of your investigation, in less than 30 seconds you can see if that username is in use at any of those 300+ sites.  A great tool to quickly narrow your research.  Go here to try it out.

Fugitives on Facebook

Almost on cue, following my last post about using social networking sites as an investigative tool… I ran across this article about a fugitive hiding from US authorities in Mexico who (somewhat foolishly) updated his status and location on his Facebook page.  While it is more and more common for investigators to search social network sites for information, what is most interesting to me about this example is that the first searches turned up nothing.

 

“Investigators initially could find no trace of him on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, and they were unable to pin down his exact location in Mexico.”

But the actions of a persistent investigator turned up new information later in the investigation.  I recently posted a question on LinkedIn about the use of monitoring tools in investigations to address this very issue.

“But several months later, Secret Service agent Seth Reeg checked Facebook again — and up popped Maxi Sopo. His photo showed him wearing a black jacket decorated with a white lion as he stood in front of a party backdrop featuring logos of BMW and Courvoisier cognac.”

The other neat thing about this investigation is that although the fugitive’s profile was private – and therefore all the details were not visible to outsiders – the investigator was able to obtain the information by researching the fugitive’s “friends” on Facebook.

“Although Sopo’s profile was set to private, his list of friends was not, and Scoville started combing through it. He was surprised to see that one friend listed an affiliation with the Justice Department and sent him a message requesting a phone call.

‘We figured this was a person we could probably trust to keep our inquiry discreet,’ Scoville said.

The former official told Scoville he had met Sopo in Cancun’s nightclubs a few times, but did not really know him and had no idea he was a fugitive. The official learned where Sopo was living and passed that information back to Scoville, who provided it to Mexican authorities. They arrested Sopo last month.”

Pipl

Billing itself as “The most comprehensive people search on the web” Pipl is a pretty neat tool.  The big advantage of this search tool over other more common ones is that Pipl searches deep web databases to compile data matching your queries.  The results are sometimes surprisingly detailed.  Pipl searches some popular social networking sites as well as email addresses, pdf documents, webpages and whitepage listings.  I found it worthy of addition to my bookmarks.

Fact or Fiction: Evaluating Internet Sources

With the abundant open source information available on the web, it is increasingly important to ascertain the validity of information and investigate authorship.  I can recommend several great references.  These tutorials provide investigators and researchers with excellent criteria to consider when reviewing web content:

Evaluating Internet Research Sources by Dr. Robert Harris (thanks to David Jimenez for the tip)

What They Don’t Teach in Detective School by Richard McEachin at The Confidential Resource blog

Evaluating Web Pages: Techniques to Apply and Questions to Ask a tutorial at UC Berkeley

Evaluating Information Found on the Internet a tutorial at Johns Hopkins University

Information Integration Program

The Wall Street Journal published an encouraging article about the integration of various intelligence networks in the federal government agencies.  When there are captive silos of information that cannot be shared easily across organizations, the capacity for effective analytics is severely hampered.  It’s shocking to read that today’s intelligence analysts can search only 5% of available information.  This solution proposes to give them access to 95%, accounting for security clearance.  An ambitious effort for sure.