A Year of Blogging
I Dare Not Touch AI
I tell this often. In high school, you’d do a ten page term paper. In college, they went up to 20. In law school the papers were closer to 50 pages. Now, as a provider of vital information, I crank out 20 page memos every couple of days. Writing blog posts keeps me agile.
I put nine posts on my website in 2023. Really, eight posts and one post announcing an extended hiatus. In a year of blogging, I did not hit on the biggest topic of the year. I did not touch AI, Chat GT, Bing’s agent, machine learning, or anything else on the idea that researchers and investigators will be replaced by robots. As I mentioned to Kelly Paxton on her podcast, people have been trying to automate or otherwise “cheat” background checks for years. My lack of blogging on the subject should tell you what I think of this project.
AI aside, I have things. My internal goal is to put up a post a week on my things; it is a standard I almost never meet due to real world circumstances. When I announced the blog was on hold, there had only been two posts for 2023. There would be no posts from March 28 until August 25, and then six more through the end of 2023. Three of these last posts of 2023 used OSINT clip art I snagged somewhere in the Internet.
Here’s a recap of the things I covered in 2023:
On January 18, I posted “What D’ Ya Got, Part III.” I trusted you had read parts one and two in 2022. My Cousin Vinny is one of my favorite movies, and I can watch repeatedly. I never tire of the final court room scene, with Ms. Mona Lisa Vito explaining the defense was wrong, and I love how Vinny skips the niceties of direct examination at the end, because we know the movie needs to end soon, asking the sheriff, what’d ya get (got). The What D’ Ya get meme was my excuse to explain some of the things we researchers put in our memos.
I waited all the way to February 27 to kvel about my work in the preceding year.
I posted my Gone Fishin’, hiatus post on March 28. As someone who’s been reading blogs since about when blogs were invented circa 2000, I’m well aware of blogs going dormant, of sites that just rusted and faded away before they burned out. I was promising to return.
I did on August 25. One of my main things, the Big Data wars was ripe for a post. I remain annoyed when fellow researchers and investigators poo-pah products from Lexis, TLO, etc. I understand the frustration, that on one hand you have people pasting this reports over their letterhead and calling it due diligence, and on the other, that people are relying on quick, simple reports in lieu of more detailed information. Yet, to be cliché, as I argue, it is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. My friends at Pursuit published a version of this post in September.
So you want to do that OSINT thing. My posts were picking up a lot of readers, and an appearance on Kelly Paxton’s podcast also helped raise my visibility. I put three somewhat related topics into a post on October 18. The gist was trying to figure out what the INT was in the OSINT game.
My intention in my next post was to be less theoretical and more practical. How exactly does an open-source researcher research. The theme of the post, “you hear people talk about the smell test or sixth sense or after so many searches, I just know. The truth is, you don’t. You just get better at figuring out accuracy, authority, legitimacy.”
Know your goals and scope. Know where to look. Know how to search. Know what to do with what you find. You want to do this OSINT thing, and this was as straightforward as I could get.
My second to last post in 2023 was my favorite piece. It a continuation of two peeves: 1) You cannot rely on OSINT lists, and 2) You cannot ignore Big Data. To prove my points, I showed you could find ownership in the news; hidden business relationships in UCC filings, and track people down via lawsuits.
I ended the year with this simple proclamation: It Wasn’t the Best Year Ever But It Was the Year My Vital Information Helped Send a Man to Prison.
I’m putting it on paper now, this is one of 52 for 2024. Hope you follow along.