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.”

CAIMR Releases First Annual Workshop Report

The Center for Applied Identity Management Research (CAIMR) released it’s first annual workshop report this month.  In the report, CAIMR determined that the United States has failed to stay ahead of the identity theft curve and the battle against identity crimes is currently being lost.  The report outlines an aggressive research agenda to identify and develop solutions to mitigate an expanding list of identity threats.

Launched in October 2008, CAIMR is a non-profit corporation comprised of thought leaders from government, corporate and academic organizations who share a common interest in the multi-faceted aspects and critical challenges of identity management. CAIMRs primary mission is to study identity issues impacting commerce, government, and national security, their social implications, and the processes, technologies and polices designed to deal with them. Most importantly, its applied research emphasis is focused on discovering real world solutions.  More info at http://caimr.indiana.edu.

Wikipedia for Spies…

This article in Time discusses the progress of Intellipedia, a wiki-based mult-agency intelligence sharing platform.  I wrote briefly about it back in January.  It’s interesting, although not surprising, to hear that the Intellipedia proponents faced stiff opposition in getting the project approved and then received resistence in implementing it.  “‘There’s been pushback throughout the whole process,’ says [Intellipedia developer Don Burke]. Initially, analysts who were asked to participate said they were too busy or just preferred the old, proprietary databases managed by individual agencies.”  Sounds all too familiar.

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.

Who’s the Twit?

Read an interesting article in Newsweek about ghostwriting of blogs and even Twitter posts (often called “tweets”).  In fact, the article mentions  recently launched UK company Twit4hire as example of a professional microblogging firm that can be hired to post as many as 20 tweets a day on your behalf.  As an investigator or researcher, remember not to assume that someones name on an article, blog post, or other online publication means that the content is actually written by them.  Trust but verify.

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

Emporis.com: Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound

Empois.com is a self-described “large and free-to-use website about buildings.”  That’s true.  They host a massive database with information on buildings (large and small) in over 60,000 cities.  Much of the content comes from public records, vendors, and research companies but Emporis.com also solicits information from it’s user community.  You can browse cities for the tallest buildings and view details of each.  The database hosts varying levels of detail about specific buildings but it generally includes the year built, a photo (popular buildings have anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand photos), the architect and builder information, number of floors, and bordering streets.  Sometimes lat/long geodata is provided as well.  Another cool feature is that the database contains information on buildings currently under construction and even projects that were planned but abandoned or put on hold.  Great resource to add to the online investigator’s toolkit.

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.