Get The Facts on Anyone
Master the Basics
So, you want to be an OSINT professional. You want to analyze crater sites. Drop geolocation into two out of three conversations. Your role model is Bellingcat.
Stop.
Master the basics.
· The Wisdom of Reporters
· Obtaining a Death Certificate
· Or Name Change
· That One Court
The Wisdom of Reporters
A recent article in the Chicago Tribune prompted this post. While I am (still) a Trib subscriber, I no longer actually read it page after page. It's been a long time since I sat down daily and “read the paper”. I am, however, flooded by its social media, on my Facebook, my Twitter (I mean X), etc., and there was no way I was ignoring a headline like:
Chicago-area man who sued women for badmouthing him on dating site convicted days later of tax fraud involving mob-connected sweepstakes kiosks
Did that not raise a lot of itches to scratch? To digress – if you hang around as I hang around on certain Internet places, you find a lot of sentiment that “the Outfit’s days are over” or “there’s no organized crime anymore.” Articles like this show that organized crime has not gone away. Besides that, the article overflowed with open-source research, which reminded me that no one does OSINT better than reporters, and the best guides to open-source research are those written for/by reporters like the one pictured above.
Look at the open-source relied on in that article:
The Tribune has previously reported that Mac-T also has ties to…
…was registered to the same address on Sibley Boulevard in Dolton where Weiss also listed some of his businesses.
Originally incorporated Mac-T using an address of 723 W. Grand Ave. in Chicago, which is a single-room occupancy hotel in the same building that houses…
If you cannot dig up those facts, you do not know your OSINT. No matter your expertise in satellite imagery.
Obtaining a Death Certificate
If someone asked you to get a death certificate, could you? A key part of a recent assignment required me to obtain a death certificate. Spoiler alert, it’s a public record. Would you be able to get it? How? What would you need? What procedures would you follow? It’s not a war zone, but this is the playground you will find yourself in more often.
Or Name Change
Another challenge in the above case, showing someone was who they once were. That is a document showing they had legally changed their name. Tracking that down and getting the right document. Could you do that?
That One Court
In an earlier 2024 blog post, I noted we OSINTers were living our best lives. One of the reasons? We had court records at our keyboard fingertips. I wrote:
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…
I used the word ‘some’ broadly. Because the reality is that most court records are accessible online; some depending on what you mean by ‘records’. In other words, you can access most state and federal courthouses and find out if there’s litigation; but what you can actually find from there varies. ‘Some’ also means that not every courthouse is online, still. There remain courts that continue to require on-site searches to find if there are records. What makes it worse, there are states that put most of their individual county court records online but keep a few off. A good OSINTer will not miss this. Would you?
A tendency lingers in OSINT to think it’s about finding the thrilling and the hidden, when the reality is, it’s about finding the obvious and the mundane. Master the basics by reading some journalism texts and go from there.