Hello everyone. I have been away working the last few weeks so I haven't been active recently. But I have been checking in every now and again. Whilst I was away I had a few thoughts and reflected on how crazy the last few months have been.
I have been lurking and active in the investigation using a couple of accounts on Voat since /r/pizzagate went down.
Initially it was a mad frenzy of leads and information. There was so much going on. Orphanages in Haiti, Pizza shops in DC, weird bands and artists, properties and tunnels. Hundreds of people would be throwing in new leads and connections and then thousands of people would go away and follow up the leads or make more connections. Websites going down. Threads getting scrubbed. It was pretty intense.
Over the course of the last few months I have seen this investigation change and evolved. It's inevitable it change the further it got from the epicenter. It's great to see it still thriving. It's turned from a mad quick frenzy connecting dot after dot on a daily basis to more of a slower, consistent and methodical grind of repeating the message and exposing the busts that have happened all around the world since this investigation started.
The purpose of this post:
- To allow older community members to share research tips and tools.
- To be a resource for newer community members for any future leads and investigations.
GENERAL RESEARCH TOOLS AND BEST PRACTICES
First off remember if you are investigating criminal behavior it's quite likely you will stumble across something criminal.That is the fundamental reason you are working on an investigation in the first place.
So your OpSec (Operation Security) needs to be tight. Or at least give you a fighting chance. You don't know who's tracking your internet search footprint. This is more important than ever since part 1 of the Vault 7 leaks has been revealed. If you do find a smoking gun of some sort you can be assure the people you are investigating will try every possible way to shut you up.
Browsers:
https://www.torproject.org/
Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security.
As this browser is packed with security and anonymity features you will have to change your internet habits slightly. It won't make using the internet any more difficult just a little different.
Unlike a conventional browser Tor browser doesn't allow you to download files or add browser extensions. No. Not even Adblock unfortunately. I guess that's the price you have to pay for privacy. Remember to bookmark everything.
- If you really don't want to use Tor browser (which is not recommended) you can use SRWare Iron (A browser that is the same as Chrome but without the Google tracking) or Firefox Do not use anything Google if you have can.
Search Engines + Maps + Images + Documents
Google doesn't like the Tor network. So you will have to find alternatives. Using other search engines is actually beneficial as they all turn up slightly different results. Ultimately Google is the by far the superior search engine for deep searches and obscure search term connections. But for news articles or pictures of people and places others are perfectly fine. Here are a few:
https://duckduckgo.com/
https://www.google.com/
https://www.bing.com/
Use all 3 if you are looking for lots of the same thing/person/event/place from different sources. It's surprising how different the order of the results are sometimes.
During an investigation there are generally 3 types of file you will come across: PDF, Word Document and Jpeg. To get around you will need to copy and paste the file URL to one of the site below depending on the type of document online tools.
Here are some helpful tools:
- PDF (Image with live text)
http://www.pdfescape.com/open/
https://products.office.com/en-us/office-online/view-office-documents-online
https://postimage.io/web.php
https://imgsafe.org/
https://www.ezphotoshare.com/
http://www167.lunapic.com/editor/ (this one allows you to crop and resize images online)
Internet accounts
Avoid spam and stay safe - use a disposable email address!
This is handy. You can use this to sign up to most stuff. Just save the randomly generated email somewhere and you can always go back to that Guerrilla Mail account if need be (password recovery) by typing it into the custom email section. Your emails don't save though.
https://protonmail.com/))
Secure Email Based in Switzerland. Secure Your Communications with ProtonMail.
It's not advised to use your own social media account for lurking so you can start up most social media accounts with these emails. If you need to verify any account with a phone number I'd suggest buying a cheap throwaway phone and keep it just for this purpose.
Archives
https://archive.is
Archive.is is a time capsule for web pages! It takes a 'snapshot' of a webpage that will always be online even if the original page disappears.It saves a text and a graphical copy of the page for better accuracy and provides a short and reliable link to an unalterable record of any web page.
https://archive.org
Explore more than 284 billion web pages saved over time.
You should get in the habit of archiving everything on both sites.
Public Information
A lot of research tools and tips I have picked up was during this investigation so a lot of the sites are DC related. But most states and most countries will have something similar.
https://pivsservices.dcra.dc.gov/PIVS/Search.aspx
Property Information Verification System
https://www.taxpayerservicecenter.com/RP_Search.jsp?search_type=Sales
Find Your Real Property - Online Bill Payment
https://opencorporates.com/
The largest open database of companies in the world
http://datagovus.com/washington-corporation.php
https://dc.gov/online-services
http://sdat.dat.maryland.gov/RealProperty/Pages/default.aspx
http://datagovus.com/washington-corporation.php
https://whois.icann.org
CANN's WHOIS Lookup gives you the ability to lookup any generic domains, such as "icann.org" to find out the registered domain owner.
http://white-house-logs.insidegov.com/
https://wikileaks.org/
https://www.wikipedia.org/
https://www.bing.com/Translator
https://www.intelius.com/
Please feel free to add any more tools or tips you may have below and I will add them to the list (with credit given)
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The_Kuru ago
I use google news "custom range" a lot. Doesn't seem to work from smart phone, just computer. Put in your search terms and then search and then click "tools" and a drop-down button will appear at the far left above the first search result and it will say "any time" with an arrow. Click on that and select custom range. Then fill in the time frame you want and you can narrow your search to old articles that don't otherwise appear when you do a straight google search. That is how you access the archives.