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The Expert Podcast brings you firsthand narratives from experts across diverse industries, including private investigators, general contractors and builders, insurance agencies, vehicle specialists, lawyers, and many others.
In the world of private investigations, asset searches, fraud investigations, and probate cases, one of the most common methods of obtaining evidence is what's called ENT. There are a lot of misconceptions regarding ENT, which stands for open-source intelligence. The good news is that ENT is one of the most powerful methods of obtaining and developing a picture of what's going on in a case: what are the assets, what are the activities, and what are the hidden features of another person's life? The majority of this can be developed using open-source intelligence. Good investigators use this as their primary tool for creating a picture of whether somebody's a fraudster, whether or not there are hidden assets, or whether or not there's infidelity in a relationship, and OS is the key to all this.
So how does it work? What is it? Well, it's not any kind of secret sauce. This is a great article from the Research Observer Research Foundation about ENT, and it says open-source intelligence has arrived. Well, it's a little bit of a misnomer; open-source didn't just arrive; it's been around for a while; it's just been called different things, but now it's arrived in terms of being the primary source many times in investigation. People think that it's just a magic trick where you push a button and everything pops up on the screen. If you want to do a background check on somebody, you put in their name, hit enter, and their background pops up. The problem with doing a proper investigation is that all of the records for anything—assets, background, criminals—come from different sources. There's not one place that has it all consolidated. So open source is a way of obtaining it.
According to the beginning of the article, "well, the concept of intelligence brings to mind a covert world of spy secrets and classified documents." This is not really true. Open-source intelligence is searching for things that are hidden in plain sight. It's like a needle in a haystack; you go through vast quantities of information. It talks about the different sources: newspapers, social media, TV broadcasts, blog commentaries, and Google searches. There's usually 40 or 50 different sources of records that are used in an ENT investigation to put together a picture of what is going on with the other person or their assets.
Now, there is some secrecy to it. The classic definition of intelligence is the discovery of secrets by secret means, which is true. Open-source intelligence is done without the knowledge of the party being investigated. It doesn't create any records for that person to know they were being investigated. It can be used for business intelligence research or legal reasons, and the way it works is that you use some method of efficiency to search through thousands or tens of thousands of records to get the answer that you want as an investigator or a client.
For example, if you're looking for assets—maybe bank accounts, maybe real estate, maybe vehicles—all of the records that will dictate what assets a person has are scattered in many different places. There's not just one place that lists all of their bank accounts or one place that lists all of their vehicles. You have to gather it up from multiple locations. The trick to it is doing it efficiently, because if you did it one at a time, it would take months to do this. A good open-source investigation process uses some tools of efficiency. There are some tools you can use to make it easier, but it's also the skill set of the investigator to know how to take that job that could be hundreds and hundreds of hours of labor and boil it down to maybe 15 or 20 hours of labor. That way, it's convenient, efficient, cost-effective, and not overly expensive for a client.
If you imagine a large criminal case where the government is trying to find a Ponzi schemer or murderer, they're going to spend months and months gathering evidence. That's ENT. But if you want to do it in the private sector, you can do it using budgetary constraints where you can organize the project to get the records from one place, compare them to records from another place, maybe banking information, maybe wire transfer information, maybe vehicle information. Even the location of vehicles is often discoverable because there's a license plate reader all over the place. You probably drive by 20 or 30 license plate readers every day; you don't even know it. And that can track your vehicle. Maybe there's digital forensic information from digital devices. You know, modern smartphones, even flip phones, have some digital forensics information available.
If you are looking for a complicated answer for your case, probate case, asset hidden asset case, divorce case, maybe corporate embezzlement, maybe corporate intelligence, maybe you're looking to find out if a company really is representing itself correctly, do they have the contracts they say they do, do they have the employees they say they do, all this can be put together with open-source intelligence.
And it's a skill. The other good news is that, as a consumer or a client, you can do all this yourself. Open-source is really just a matter of brute-force research. It takes time, but if you have time and would rather spend your time than money, you can do this investigation yourself. There are some tools, some training, and some suggestions and advice you can get. All the information's out there; it's just hidden in plain sight. You're not going to get information that is completely private; it's not reachable. And even if you somehow get it illegally, you can't use it for anything that is sufficient. However, every piece of information that you think might be private that you can get exists somewhere in the open-source environment, and you can get it that way if you spend enough time, effort, and intellectual curiosity to find it. If you do have questions about using open-source intelligence in your investigation or in your research, you can reach us through our website. We have a function where you can arrange for a consultation with a licensed investigator to talk about your case.