Good morning, reporters! Apologies I missed my usual midweek deadline. I’m sending a very quick TFR from the campus of American University, where I’m teaching high schoolers how to do investigative reporting 🏫 Bless their hearts.
Today we’re learning how to use IntelTechniques, a tool I learned from the super cool crew at First Draft News.
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IntelTechniques lets you pull up the photos someone has “interacted with”, the places they’ve checked in, the social sites where they have an account, all that good backgrounding stuff. You can also operate it in reverse – find Facebook users named Steve who live in Florida, for example.
If we’re being honest, it’s just a better way to interact with the APIs at those sites. Which means, you can go to Facebook.com and look for someone named Steve in Florida, but IntelTechniques works better.
Plus, it can do so much at once! At one point I clicked “Check all” and 20 tabs burst open, each one running my email address through a different site.
Now, the thing I always warn my students is that backgrounding is always a crapshoot. You might find a lot of Steves in Florida, for instance, but not the one you’re looking for. You might find the one you’re looking for but he hasn’t liked any Facebook photos. (Dammit, Steve!)
But you can always run him through your 20 tabs and see if something comes up. Happy hunting!