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...