Tag Archive for: investigation
Cell Phone Pinging and Probable Cause
The next time an investigator tells you he can legally “ping” someone’s cell phone to figure out where they are going, run away fast. We’ve written before about the illegality of getting a friendly phone company employee…
CBS and Benghazi: Lessons for Fact Checkers
Now that 60 Minutes has apologized for airing a false eyewitness account of the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, what can investigators, journalists and others who deal in facts learn from the incident, well summarized by the Columbia…
Catching Captain Hookah: How the Silk Road Mastermind Revealed Himself in a Chatroom
Last week, FBI officials caught the mastermind behind an underground e-commerce site called Silk Road, which has been called the “Amazon of illegal drugs.” Since its creation in 2011, the site took in $1.2 billion in revenue…
Investigating Jurors: The Ethical Bounds of Using Social Media
We recently read that one of the jurors in the Jodi Arias murder trial had both tweeted at a famed criminal defense attorney and posted a comment about Arias having “Latina blood” on her Facebook page after the jury had convicted…
IRS Form 990: The Investigator’s Friend
If we had five dollars for every time someone asked us to get hold of someone’s bank accounts (pretty much always against the law and therefore off-limits), we would have enough money to buy a lovely lunch for two.
Sometimes, people who…
Big Data? Good Investigators Prefer Their Data Small
When you see two big book reviews and an entire special section of The Wall Street Journal devoted to a topic, a curious person should ask: how does this affect me, my family, my business, the world? The book is Big Data: A Revolution that Will…
The Library’s Hidden Treasure: Librarians
When they’re stuck on a piece of research in my course on fact investigation, I often tell my law students that the loneliest people in the world are waiting to help them: reference librarians. That line came to mind this week after I…
Smartphone Security: Newer is Not Always Better
An entertaining piece in the Wall Street Journal today describes the preferred mobile phone for Japanese philanderers. It’s an older Fujitsu model that the faithful get reconditioned to keep it running for three years and longer. Its main…
The Half-Life of Facts: Required Reading for Lawyers
A wonderful new book called The Half-Life of Facts by Samuel Arbesman makes riveting reading for anyone in the business of gathering information. Don’t let the fact that the author is an applied mathematician scare you off. Arbesman keeps…
Internet Fraud: How to Spot a Possible Scam on the Web
A friend's on-line purchase led him ask us to look into a website. The results make for a nice case study in the detection of possible fraud.
