This is the Best Year Ever (for Open Source Researchers)
· Businesses Tell You Who They Are
· People Tell You Who They Are
· Court Records Easy
· But Those Were The Days…
In my penultimate blog post of 2023, I pined for best years ever, noting 2023 wasn’t one of them for me. I will say that regardless of my personal travails, 2023 was a glorious year for open-source researchers, and 2024 could become our best year ever. Just look at how things used to be and how they are today. Still, as good as we have it, I’ll also tell you that it used to be better.
Businesses Tell You Who They Are
I sent out a memo yesterday, and the first line in the main body: “[so and so company] does not have a website”. We expect every company to have a website. We expect every company to tell us about themselves upon googling its name. We expect an About Us section with details on who runs the company, and we expect Terms of Service or Privacy Policies with details on the exact company behind the website. No matter how cheap the design, the website will tell us something. Thirty years ago, when I started doing background research, the idea that companies willingly put all this information forth would be laughable. A company not registered with the SEC, with no public stock, no public debt, no pending IPO, well, its obligation to the public was bupkis. Businesses did not tell us who they were. They do now.
People Tell You Who They Are
Not only do we expect all companies to have websites, but we also expect just about everyone to have a LinkedIn profile. In the olden days you also got bupkis - no one said nothin’ to nobody about who they were or how they got there. Now, we get their employment histories, education, and certifications, and you can see whose promotions they liked. Individuals didn’t used to tell us this stuff. They do now.
And this social media thing? Not only are people putting all this information about themselves on their LinkedIn’s, they’re creating Twitter, I mean X, Facebook, Instagram and other social media accounts. What a wonderful world we live in where people tell us every day what they think, where they ate, and what color is their new car. There is a big difference between LinkedIn and the rest. Like a company having a website, we now expect people we deal with to have a LinkedIn. While we can expect people to have social media accounts, we cannot expect they want to share this material with us. It is common for social media accounts to have some form of privacy restriction.
Court Records Are Easy
It’s great that we can learn about companies via their websites; that we can learn about individuals by reading their LinkedIn profiles (and maybe combing through their socials). But we can also find out a lot about both by looking at court records. Court record have always been one of the best ways for OSINTers to find things. They are vital in background research because of what they say on their surface and what they may say underneath. If someone is sued for fraud or breach of contract or is criminally convicted, it is what it is. Yet litigation records are also treasure troves of data, such as people’s addresses, family members, business details, professional resumes. All sorts of things can be found by going through them.
Litigation records have always been mostly public: civil and criminal litigation indices, the names of people and companies suing, being sued, and getting arrested. Plus, civil and criminal dockets, the progress and status of pending cases, pleadings, motions, decisions, and orders – most of it public. Besides so much useful information being public, once upon a time it took a visit to a city, county, or federal courthouse to actually get it. Today, some, emphasis on some, comprehensive court records are available from the comfort of your keyboard.
There’s nothing complicated or intricate about getting litigation records. As long as you accept that you will be at the tender mercies of some court bureaucracy – county or state, federal or not, civil or criminal. Where you search and what you want to get will dictate how much you can do online. In other words, it depends. Cases filed in federal courts? The world is your oyster. Except for the growing number of records sealed for confidentiality reasons, it’s all there. Indices, docket sheets, and all the underlying documents can be found online and printed for a small fee. Or a large fee if you want to see transcripts in criminal cases, which can run over $100 for a set.
State court cases, meaning those filed in county courthouses, on matters that cannot be filed in federal courts? It’s a kaleidoscope. Some states like Wisconsin or Indiana allow a single online search that includes all county courts statewide. Elsewhere, states like Florida, California, and Texas make you go to the county website for each court. Then, what you may get in addition to just indices, well that depends too. Often, but not always, you’ll get some kind of docket or registry of motions, filings, or actions, but more likely than not your state court searches won’t let you see or read the actual filings. Still, just knowing there is litigation, the parties, the case status – that’s big. Another headache, there’s still a few places, looking at you New Hampshire, without online access to their court records.
But Those Were The Days
If we live in what seems like the best of times to be open-source researchers, know that there was a golden era. The good old days. There are at least two ways I can think of that where we’ve gone backwards. The arc of justice does not always bend towards open-source. First, it’s website domains. I said above that we expect every company to have a website. That’s good. But what can we find out about the website itself? What can we find out about any website? We used to be able to “whois” a website and find out its background, or pedigree – meaning who registered the domain, their addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses associated with the domain. Now, “privacy restricted” is usually what you get. There is very little open-source intelligence on websites beyond what the websites actually say.
The other way we’re going backwards is in news sources. In the glory days, every newspaper in the world, except maybe The Wall Street Journal, allowed you to read their pages online. These days it’s a paywall here, a paywall there, everywhere a paywall. The alternative to subscribing to all those online publications used to be to access them via services like Factiva or Nexis. But now, publications are pulling out of those things too. Like the Washington Post is no longer on Nexis. There was a day we could peruse all sorts of news sources for open-source intelligence. Now, we have to pick and choose what we want to pay for.
Every year, we OSINTers will run into new challenges and learn to master new tricks. Many things we take for granted today will be gone tomorrow. But who knows, by this time next year we may look back and realize that 2024 was our best year ever.