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.”

Social (Media) Stratification

A recent study by Nielsen (referenced in this CNN article) indicates that social networking sites may magnify social and economic  stratification.  The study suggests that less affluent people tend to be users of MySpace, more affluent users are on Facebook, and the most affluent are on LinkedIn and Twitter – although researchers did notice significant overlap – where users are registered on multiple networks – particularly between Facebook and LinkedIn.  While MySpace captured an early lead in the social networking race, more educated and affluent users jumped ship and headed to Facebook.  Consider this sobering statistic - Percentage of users with a six-figure salary:

16% MySpace | 23% Facebook | 38% LinkedIn

Why the disparity – particularly between MySpace and Facebook?

A lot of it has to do with the disparate beginnings of MySpace and Facebook, said Adam Ostrow, editor-in-chief of Mashable, a blog about social media. Facebook originated at Harvard University and was limited at first to students at approved colleges before opening itself to the public in September 2006.

MySpace, on the other hand, had a “come one, come all” policy and made a mad dash towards monetization, Ostrow said. “They used a lot of banner ads without regard to the quality, and it really diminished the value [of the site] for the more tech-savvy demographic.”

These are factors for the investigative researcher to take into consideration when querying social networking sites.

Privacy

Great post by Schneier:  Privacy in the Age of Persistence.  As an investigative researcher, I’m thrilled by the ever growing content cloud on the Internet.  Every day, there is exponentially more information to search through – all of it potentially useful for an investigator.  But Schneier raises some good points about how communication is shifting and “conversations” are becoming more permanent and what that means for privacy in the long run.  Big implications here.

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

What’s Up Doc?

The state of Florida is well-known in the public records arena for offering up all kinds of records, making skip tracing and background investigations that much easier.  One tremendous source of information that is often overlooked is the free data downloads offered by the Florida Department of Health, Division of Medical Quality Assurance.  You’ll find data files that list licensed medical practitioners – from acupuncturists to doctors to pharmacists to therapists, nurses, and all other types of medical providers.    They even have a list of people that have requested a license application – even if they didn’t submit it yet.  And they have a database of health clinics.  If you’re into data as much as I am, you can have a field day with this information.

Social Network OSINT

Tamara Thompson recently published a great article in the December issue of Law Technology News regarding the use of social networking websites during due diligence research on people and companies.  The article is particularly good because it describes effective search techniques that investigators or researchers should use when searching social media sites like MySpace, Facebook and others.  

You can read more of Tamara’s great tips on her blog at PIbuzz.com.