Olympic Intelligence Gathering

An investigative article I have been working on was just published in the Dominion. The main themes are looking at the US side of Olympic security, the role of Multinational corporations in intelligence gathering, the emergence of Fusion Centers in the US and the in roads fusion centers are making in Canada.You can find a link to to the story here.

I have been doing investigative research for many years now, but I am only now learning how to apply that to journalism. One of the dilemmas I faced in writing this article was how to tell a very complicated story in 1200 words. I think in retrospect it might have made more sense to do a series of articles and fully hash out each idea.

the costs of investigative reporting

At the end of August the Mother Jones published an interesting article that looks at the high cost of doing investigative reporting. They focus on a story that was recently published in the New York Times Magazine, written by a Propublica staff writter. The investigation took two years, and cost nearly $400,000.

They write:

This story... is the kind of work that is in peril now that the financial underpinnings (i.e. advertising) for journalism have collapsed. Bloggers and commenters and citizen journalists can’t take on a project like this. They can add to it, amplify it, criticize it, and generally run with it, but a project like this requires consistent, institutional teams of reporters and editors and factcheckers and lawyers and web dudes.

Building sources of funding for investigative reporting will be a challenge going forward.

[thanks Ben]

Get off the net

So far almost every post I have made on this blog has talked about Internet. To be clear my view is that to do good research you should never limit yourself to looking on the Internet. Google does not have all the answers, and neither does the deep web. Of course the phone is probably one of the most important tool out there, but this post is about old book you find in the library: City Directories.

City Directories are books that list who lives in a city. The older versions list people by name and address, later they added phone numbers. In recent decades they have morphed into phone books, which only list people by last name. If you want someones current phone number, or to find who lives at an address of phone number today you can use a 411 site. But I have never found an online service that lets you look at what someones address and phone number was in your year of choice. To do that you have to visit the library.

City Directories are usually found in the genealogy collection. They won't be at every branch, but somewhere in your region should have them. Every year the library will get a copy of the phonebook, and they often have volumes of the city directories going back to the 1800's. These books are heavy and grabbing a decade worth of books off the shelf and bringing them to a desk might take several trips.

By going through the books you can find out not just where
someone lived but what years they moved in and out of an address. All you have to do is check the years on either side, until you find the year when their address is not listed.

Of course this technique has some limits, people change their name, only one person in a house has there name in the books, and nowadays cell phones and even many landlines do not get listed in the phone book. But I have used this technique a handful of times and found it real useful. Some times it was for historic research, but on other occasions it was for research about someones address in the last couple years.

Halifax history and crowd sourcing

I have spent the last two week in Halifax, making history posters about Halifax history, and wheat pasting those posters up in area the posters talk about. I have been doing a residency at the Roberts Street Social Centre, working on this project. It is based on a project where I have been doing the same thing in Toronto for many years, the Missing Plaque Project. I thought this would be a great moment to talk about a research technique I used to help with one of the posters I made a few years ago in Toronto.


A friend gave me a write up about a Halloween Riot of that took place in 1945 in the Beaches, a neighbourhood of Toronto. I now think the number was a little inflated but the article says there were 7000 youth rioting. It seemed like a great topic for a poster, I began researching it. After the riot a few newspaper stories had been written in the Toronto Star and Toronto Telegram. They did a fairly good job of explaining what happened at the riot, but did not explain the context. I was sure I only had part of the story. Despite exhaustive research I could not find any information that helped me figure out why youth in that era were so ready to riot.

My solution was to put up the poster anyways, but I included a paragraph saying I was sure i did not have the whole story, and asking for anyone who had more information to get in touch with me. I did not know the term at the time, but what i did was crowd sourcing. Basically crowd sourcing is putting out an open call to an undefined large group of people, in this case looking for more information. It is a great research technique.

By putting up posters in the area the riot had taken place I was targeting people in that area. Crowd sourcing isn't usually done through posters, but regardless of the medium, the principles are generally the same.

To finish my story, I got contacted by two people. One of them was a friend I was showing my posters too. It turns out he had written a play about street gangs in the 1940's and 50's. He helped me understand how youth who were too young to fight in World War II were living in the shadows of the returned veterans, with no chance to be Heroes and little chance of getting a job, since vets were given preference. I was also contacted by an old man who had been in the riot. He saw my poster and emailed me. We had coffee, and he helped me understand what the thinking of the youth was at the time of the riot.

You can follow this link to read the text of the poster.

NEW TOOL ON BING

When I first looked at Bing, (the new brand for Microsoft's search engine), I wasn't very impressed. I had always liked some tools under Microsofts old brand "Live". "Live Image Search", and "Live Map Search" are tools I liked better than Google's equivalent tools. Both of these have been carried over to Bing. However in terms of search results I wasn't being won over. Now a recent post on google blogoscope, is making me look twice.

The tool lets you search all the domains registered to an ip address. All you do is type ip: followed by an ip address. Combined with Whois this very useful in profiling a website and finding its connections to other sites.

I tried it out quickly with www.dominionpaper.ca. I used the tool from the post to find out the IP address is 209.44.112.66. When I looked this up in Bing the results showed me all sorts of sites sharing that IP address. A quick look showed me they were mostly media, civil and activist groups based in Montreal. The number of results was quiet large, 74,800, that is because the results are not only domains but also pages from within those domains. By plugging results into a whois search I found that Koumbit.net seemed to be the host server's name.

A very useful tool!

Ironically it turns out this tool is not new but had existed in Live search as well. I am certainly going to give Bing another chance.

+ syntax

The plan was to put up at least one blog post a week, and I will step up to the plate real soon with some great posts. I know i have been doing lots of Google syntax posts, here is another, i promise some more variety soon.

The Plus syntax, + , tells Google that you really meant what you typed in the search bar. it was really useful when google ignored one and two letter words. Now a days I don't use it very often at all, but it is good to be familiar with how it works.

Google likes to think it is smarter than you, (and it often is). Google will sometimes automatically change your spelling if they think you made a typo. Googler Matt Cutts explains this in more detail in a post on his blog. So if you typed the word correctly, and it really was what you were looking for you can tell that to google by adding a plus directly in front.

The other thing that Google does is include associated words, for example, if you search for motivates, Google may also search for motivated or motivate. and if you search for Street, Google will also included results for St. , Again, by adding the plus in front of the word you can tell google what you really wan; +motivates.

So here is an example of how I recently found this useful. I was researching Panis, who were natives enslaved by the French. This is what my search looked like:


Google assumed that what I really meant was the far more common word, Panic, and made that change for me. I changed my query to Slavery +panis, and then got the results I was after.

Note: you have to put the Plus directly in front of the word.
+ this + is + wrong +usage
+but +this +is +correct

SEARCHING STREET ADDRESS RANGES

Google has a peice of syntax that lets you enter number ranges into a search by putting two dots between two numbers. For example 2007..2011, will search for 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, or 2011, if any of those numbers appear in a page it will be returns in the search results. This can be useful when searching for money ranges, eg. $40..$120.

However i didn't use this syntax very often, until I recently discovered that it works within quotes. That means if you are searching a municipal website you can put a range of numbers before the name of a street, and find any mention of those addresses on the site. This is great when you are researching not a specific address but rather a strip, or block with numerous street addresses.

Here are a couple of examples of what the search might look like:

site:phila.gov “4800..5300 Baltimore”

or

site:toronto.ca "800..1200 Bathurst"

Note: If you add St. or Ave. to the end ofthe street name you will not get all the results since you will miss the full spellings, Street, and Avenue, and visaversa.