52 Minus 39 Equals a Year of OSINT Lessons (With One in the Hopper)
Grandpa Tell Me About Blogs
It was 9/11. It was that moment. Every generation has that moment. You remember where you were. I was almost where I am today. My home office, away from the rest of the bungalow. But my desk used to be on the other side. And the sports radio came out of a boom box instead of from app on a phone—wow things have changed…The morning guys, Boers and Bernstein, made me aware even as they were unaware of much. A plane. World Trade Center. Initially, they thought it was some kind of small plane accident. For the next several hours, I was glued to the TV pretty much watching it unfold, but I associate the moment with the office and the radio. Then I discovered blogs.
Like a lot people. We were confused by the event. Utterly stunned. Desperate for insight, background, facts. In the nascent worldwide web, I found a site, a guy, Instapundit. The very name, Insta, the idea that he was getting stuff and getting it to me before it hit cable or the newspapers or all the other sloth-ful ways we once got news. He roped me in. Getting me instant access. Instapundit was a blog. He also introduced me to blogs, bloggers, a whole structure and system. The post 9/11 era was the heyday of blogs. An era long gone. Except I still blog.
You may feel that social media killed blogs. For sure, the immediacy, the instant analysis, the conversation initiated via blogs dwarfed how social media, specifically Twitter, could do it. Still, blogs died way before Twitter. They died in the sense that people like me called ourselves bloggers. The classic, “that guy” blogger was supposed to be a stunted, over-educated young adult, a little too up-to-date on technology, ranting into the void from his parent’s basement. The reality became, blogs were another tool for corporate America. Blogs became business and businesses became bloggers. Who wants to part of that. You started with instant punditry, you ended with OSINT lessons.
Broken Promises
My purpose as a non-blogger, blogger, is to pass along lessons from thirty plus years of public record research. My implicit promise has been to teach, both the mundane and specific, and, the conceptual and big picture. Of course it is a marketing exercise, yet I am not writing for or to my clients.
From this larger promise, I made the promise that I would put up a post a week in 2024. Believe me, I can find 52 things to say. I do not, however, ever have 52 weeks of time to write. There are cases and clients and a whole host of other concerns some of you know about. Thus, the lofty goal of 52 was only 75% off, although I do have one pending post besides this for the year. I did put up 13 posts. Behold the lessons from the 13 posts to date.
A Year in Blog Posts
January 2, 2024 – Filled with January 2, optimism, I said, “I’m putting it on paper now, this is one of 52 for 2024. Hope you follow along.” The rest of the post was a re-cap of 2023.
January 15, 2024 – Already behind. This post asserted how things are a lot easier in the OSINT world. It was the best year ever. I also took some shots at AI in background research. As 2024 closes, I too have been sucked in to the modern way.
January 18, 2024 – The New New 52. It does not take long to realize you are not meeting your goal of a post a week. To get back some momentum, I re-posted something from 2019. A favorite topic of mine, that good research happens long before you start the assignment.
January 29, 2024 – I’m sure people want specifics. I tend to go broad. I love the cliché, give the gal a fish and she eats that day. Teach her to fish and she’s never hungry. Why tell exactly what I did when I can tell you why I did it. This post provided four areas to work on to be better at OSINT. My big advice: think better.
February 7, 2024 – I said what I could probably say 52 times, “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.” The lesson also, the best teachers of open-source research are reporters. From them we can learn how to handle the basics. Focus on that.
April 4, 2024 – Wow, what happened. Like six weeks between posts. But the first time I cited McDonalds on the blog. Like them, I had lost count on how many served. From that inchoate sum, I provided a few life-lessons.
May 8, 2024 – “I know a lot about being productive. I just find it exceedingly difficult to be productive.” No truer words have been written by me in all the blogs I’ve written (which also includes a previous website and many years as a local food authority). Hopefully, a little confession bought me some goodwill. If I was giving you anything on OSINT, maybe I was helping you get things done. If not that, at least you’d know what else Seinfeld is famous for.
May 14, 2024 – Any story with these words, “Mr. Omar Khan – who “wore tailored suits…talk in a honeyed baritone about literature, business, and travel, sharing lessons he’d learned climbing Mount Fuji or waiting for a cappuccino at the Beau-Rivage in Geneva. His alluring old-world twinkle…Amongst those roped in…,” hits all my sweet spots and gets itself a blog post. Somehow, I also fit in some ranting re what I have to do when tasked with transnational research.
August 27, 2024 – Every name is common. With all those missed weeks, I had better deliver something useful. This post gave advice on how to manage the biggest hurdle we have in OSINT, that all names are common.
September 23, 2024 – Write shorter posts. The best thing I can say about this post, perhaps the best thing I can say about any post I wrote this year, is that it prompted advice from a friend and former colleague. I do believe knowing about UCCs enhances your ability to search for them. I had to say a lot. Since then, I have tried to shorten the posts.
November 15, 2024 – In which a LinkedIn commentator did not like, at all, my use of Scooby Do as a metaphor. For better or worse, this is not advice I’m heeding as much as keep posts shorter. I love the, if not for those meddling kids, line. I thought I put it to good use in this post.
November 21, 2024 - In 2024 I didn’t do the Chicago Marathon. I didn’t do one in 2021, 2022, or 2023, either. This is a running joke. See how I managed to fit this and some other brutal Dad jokes into the realm of OSINT.
December 2, 2024 – You miss 100 percent of the shots you do not take, said by Wayne Gretzky and spread to non-hockey fans by Michael Scott on the Office. Here, the lesson, the worst kind of due diligence is the one you do not do at all.
Once again, what goes up, when it does go up, would not be possible without the diligent eye of John Kula, who reviews my work before posts (except this one, so any errors are my fault). I’m humbled by all the comments and views provided over the year on LinkedIn. You guys make it easy to do this. I might just offer to do 52 posts in 2024. I doubt I’ll live up to that promise. Stick around for what happens.