Brexit’s Prediction Lesson for Investigators
What lesson does the Brexit vote hold for anyone conducting or contemplating fact investigation?
Don’t let confirmation bias muddy your thinking.
One of the key “Investigator’s Enemies” identified in my book, The Art of Fact Investigation,…
How to Improve Your Privacy by Staying Off Databases
A reader of my new book, The Art of Fact Investigation, suggested that for the next edition there should be a chapter about legal ways to “hide from snoopers, private and public sector. I am probably not the only one who was thinking as I…
Computers Come Up Short on Mapping Reality
A story in today’s Wall Street Journal about “Why the Virtual Reality Hype is About to Come Crashing Down” makes the simple point that computers haven’t caught up to all the permutations of real life to make a “virtual reality” headset…
Lessons from the Panama Papers
When is a big financial story an unsurprising financial story? When it turns out that people from corrupt and repressive countries are sneaking their money offshore to keep it hidden.
The world today is tearing into a huge leak of Panamanian…
Valuable Garbage: It’s Not Just in the Trashcan
A fascinating piece in today’s Wall Street Journal about a Japanese collector of North Korean garbage got me thinking about the value not just of garbage in a normal investigation, but to take a minute and to ask, ‘What is garbage?”
First,…
The Apple Fight: Before Arguing About Privacy, Define Privacy
The current fight between Apple and the U.S. Department of Justice, which is trying to execute a search warrant in a criminal matter, has been framed by Apple and its defenders as a battle over privacy.
Apple is not arguing that the information…
Four Ways to Evade the New Treasury Rules on Luxury Property
There is much less than meets the eye in new Treasury Department rules aimed at tracking “secret buyers of luxury property,” as the New York Times put it this morning. When you look at the new rules here, you see that it will fall…
The First Mistake was Calling it a Science
There is a sad piece in the Wall Street Journal today about the demise of librarians and university programs in library science, In the Age of Google, Librarians Get Shelved. People trained to run computers do not have the training to gather…
Social Media: Great Intelligence Right There in the Open
It has emerged that the woman who with her husband shot 14 people to death in San Bernardino, California had posted her support of violent jihad on social media even before immigrating to the United States. As reported in the New York Times…
The Spokeo Lawsuit: Databases Are Riddled With Errors
Spokeo and other low-cost or free information sites on the web spew out a lot of garbage, and that can do a lot of harm. This blog takes no position on whether a private right of action exists under the Fair Credit Reporting Act even when no…
