Erroneous Knowledge

Being in California I have seen plaques from the native sons of the golden west and thought nothing about them at the Burlingame train station. They seemed like a benign fraternity but if you dig a little deeper into their history you realize they were like California's KKK chapter against the Japanese. They really hated the Japanese and wanted to expel them from California as if the Japanese were vermin in the early 20th century. Native sons of the golden west go way back into the 1800's and their anti-japanese stance existed at the moment it seems that Japanese immigrants arrived in the late 1800's. They wanted to end birth right citizenship for Japanese Americans who were born in America. This echoes today with Republicans questioning birth right citizenship and considering getting rid of it. The hostilities towards Japanese immigrants resonants today with the attack on the newly arrived Latinx immigrants. The zenophobia is always an old trope that seems to never end wit...

Glaucous Research Group got suspended ftb in California from doing business due to stock market manipulation in 2017. Could explain why Soren Aandahl jumped ship to Blue Orca Capital after being director of reserach at Glaucous. An acrimonious retreat from California to Austin Texas? opencorporates.com informed me of the suspended ftb status leading to a little digging into a stock manipulation scandal. Short selling does not work so well in a bull market when the market is raging upward. When the inevitable crash occurs we will see who was naked when the tide recedes. Bear markets are more conducive to short selling naturally as profiting from a drop can only happen with a downward motion in markets.

My learning methods are flawed. I am not doing spaced retrieval exercises which is supposedly the most effective means of learning. Spacing out what you retrieve from memory of your reading is time tested the best way. I tend to read and reread which is ineffective and I don't force myself to sit away from the text and try to remember everything I have just read. It is like dyeing cloth. You dip the cloth in the dye over and over again and the coloration gets more and more saturated and radiant. Spacing the time you remember what you have learned repeatedly ,spaced repetition, is important and I have to practice this more.

Knowing how to pivot is important in OSINT it seems and to go from a wide scope to a narrower scope. Pivot charts are useful to collect information of results from selectors, each pivot being a resultant node of information. Going from a wide search to a narrower search is like the goldilock's effect, a little too wide and you lose focus but too focused you can lose out on other wider details. All sources state that methdology trumps tools and the focus early on in an OSINT career is to develop your methodology like knowing how to pivot and knowing the intelligence cycle. Being nimble and flexible in your search queries is important to hone your searches using Google as a primary tool to locate information. You just have to Google it. You Google to find tools like websites that facilitate investigations. It seems that Rae Baker, the author of Deep Dive into OSINT, is adept at using Google to serve her needs though she stresses the importance of methodology. Cynthia Hetherington of ...

The Automatic Identification System known as AIS is a ship broadcast system that is used to track the movement of ships at sea and can be readily spoofed to obfuscate travel. It can be shut off to cover up illegal trade like ship to ship cargo transfers for shipping to sanctioned countries. This "going dark" is a common practice with Russian ships that transport Ukranian grain from occupied territory to Turkey and Egypt. Maritime travel is replete with information from the AIS that can give a ship's IMO number which can then aide in identifying the ship or be spoofed as well so that a ship can appear to be another ship.

IMO #9697428 DALI container ship was responsible for the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore. I randomly discovered it going to FUJIAN China on MarineTraffic.com. That is crazy how that mishap occurred and is yet to be rebuilt costing billions to Baltimore but more accurately the US Government. What a strange coincidence to just randomly select a boat and than look it up on vesselfinder.com. It is a Singaporean container ship. The Indian crew was stranded in Baltimore for some time. Was it a freak accident? Clearly a lapse in someone's judgement?

Geo Group stock is rallying going from $15 to $25 in a matter of days. They benefit from a push towards private prisons and detention centers because they build and run detention centers. With the coming administration there will be a demand for detention centers for the undocument immigrants that will be funneled to the detention centers. Geo Group has allegedly used slave labor in some of its facilities and I wonder if they will do the same in the future with unfair labor practices. Prisons being privatized means that they cut cost across the board neglecting health services like mental health for prisoners and detainees. They have profit margins to look after and earnings calls to report to so they cut corners to boost their margins. It is only natural, it is a business after all for profit, right? I wonder if I can dig up anything on Geo Group as an open source investigation. I don't know how to go about a due dilligence investigation but there are seed information to go off of...

According to Hetherington there are different phases to an investigation. The first phase would be a due dilligence search online. The second phase would be finding physical records like court dockets. The third phase would be continued monitoring making it a cyclical process that continues back to the first phase. There is a business online that has public record retrivers basically gophers that go find hard documents in public records for you as a service. The business is called PRRN Public Record Retriver Network. There are retrivers all accross America in the hundreds. This fact never occurred to me as a business but it makes sense. There is due dilligence demand for the service to be provided for doing background checks of associates and employees.

Hetherington's book details another intelligence cycle methodology called "CRAWL" which stands for "Communicate", "Research", "Analyze", "Write", and "Listen". Although there is overlap between the intelligence cycle and "CRAWL" the differences are that the intelligence cycle is for actuating intelligence as in military engagements and "CRAWL" is suited for due dilligence such as background checks of businesses or individuals. Cynthia Hethrington's book is a compelling read and I have yet to finish it but I am looking forward to finishing it with alacrity. It seems I am reading a lot of books that are OSINT adjacent right now. Apologies my dear reader for the dearth of details I am only beginning my journey but I will try to inform you as much as I can muster.

Python has a builtin funciton called property() that can create an attribute instance when assigned to a variable. A property will have a getter and setter method already built into it like when you use a property decorator on a function. I am still puzzling over it but it was interesting and explained a lot of code that is out there that uses @property as a decorator in Python3 codebases. It is a common construct to use although getter and setter can be an anti-pattern and there are ways to implement properties that are more pythonic. It is hard to put everything together beyond toy examples and actually build real stuff with it. Reading documentation gives a lot of theory but without praxis all theory is shit. It is all about building. I have been reviewing code from Bellingcat's github repository and it is full of well made Python3 based tools. Some of the regular expressions implemented are beyond my reckoning but for a advance beginner as myself I can surmount the hurdles with...

A lot of OSINT sources like to clarify what OSINT is or open source intelligence from the get go. They give trite and staid definitions that seem to clear the hurdle for legalese. The OHCHR Berkeley Protocol is thorough in its proceedings of jurisprudence and the juridical nature of investigations. However it is also noted that open source investigators are not vested with the same powers of legal entities such as the ability to subpoena or carry out a full fledged legal investigation. Open source investigators still have the responsibilities to protect witnesses and respect the rights of the accused as legal entities practice. There is a fair bit of legalese used in the Berkeley Protocol making it abstruse to a regular reader. There is a gamut of evidentiary practices with regards to copy right. You have to seek the permission of the creator of content to get approval for use. But there is the case of 'fair use' of media though there is a narrow allowance as evidence. Cre...

Discovered the Hetherington Group and found out they offer an academy for OSINT training jointly with a college. This seems really compelling and may be more affordable than the SANS 497 course. SANS 497 is prohibitively expensive going for $8500. It is like they are actually trying to make money. Given my penurious existence there is little chance I can afford to take this course and may have to go another route like self-study or scrap together enough to get myosint training which is another learning platform for OSINT. I really wish Maltego's software was more affordable too. There seems to be huge business contracting with the government that can pay premium for OSINT products. DATASTORE from ICIJ looks to be good software to create a database of documents to easily review in bulk. Also Hunchly is another product that is affordable for OSINT research at $100 dollars a year when compared to Maltego's $5500 yearly license. You would think if you are paying $5500 for software ...

The Intelligence cycle must be strictly adhered to and learned thoroughly. The basics will go a long way in being an OSINT practitioner and stressing the process of the Intelligence cycle should hold greater primacy than focusing on tools. The first phase of an OSINT engagement involves planning and then organizing the initial action such as beginning to ask simple questions of who, what, when, and where. Who is the target? What is the objective is another question possibly asked. You then move from here to action. To note one must not focus too much on tooling initially. One must focus on the process and the Intelligence Cycle. Also one must realize that mastering the basics is essential and indeed experts are simply those who have better mastered the basics and can properly incorporate them into their workflow. A lot of the writing starts off with a fresh definition of OSINT to establish a base to build off of I suppose. The meaning of intelligence and information is an example ...

After studying cybersecurity at City College of San Francisco, I realized I enjoy puzzling over programming than actually hacking into systems. The school's cybersecurity program teaches you how to basically be a script kiddie with the advance hacking course and how to use metasploit. But I have found that programming is more free form and varied and a bit more interesting than trying to use pre-fabricated shell code from metasploit. I guess I am not malicious or have that power tripping urge to make other people's lives miserable digitally. I would hate to be at the receiving end of a cyber attack. Golden rule I guess. Programming is harder and more in depth and the real meat of any hack is in the programming. The code tells all and if you can read the code the more you can understand. I am on the fence though of continuing with programming however unlikely of gaining employment with my acumen or just getting a joe job and try to stay a float. I should continue on and wait and...

Read about how to use the time module in www.realpython.com. You can use time in a decorator or create a Time class to instantiate a start of a timer and an end of a timer. Decorators are quite onerous but useful. I wonder if there could be a use for a decorator in recursion? Recursion still boggles my mind if you don't take in consideration of the unwrapping from the stack of the function leading to a base case. Also I never realized that data structures could be recursive like lists and dictionaries. That you can apply recursion with python lists is really fascinating. I am at a loss of a direct use case just the same with coroutines but nevertheless interesting.