Here are some things to consider about this strange news item:

1. If they don’t get enough money to buy this video, then we don’t know if it really exists, but the damage is done.

2. If they buy it, then they are paying-off criminals. After all they are self-professed crack dealers. They are the gangsters that bring about most of the shootings and murders in Toronto.

3. If they buy it, they need to buy the device that recorded the video or we can’t tell if it was altered.

4. It will take a long time to analyze the video to determine if it is likely unaltered. If it is altered or fake, it doesn’t matter, the damage is done.

5. While the video may be unaltered, we might not ever know if it was a continuous recording or one that was recorded selectively for some desired effect.

6. No matter what happens, the damage is done — damage that goes far beyond one mayor or city. Welcome to the brave new journalism.

Have you ever searched an email address and found that it was compromised? Groups like Anonymous and Lulzsec sometimes post lists of compromised email addresses along with the associated passwords. Do you know where to search for this and how to report it?

“I didn’t post that! My account was hacked!” is a common ‘Weinergate’ inspired excuse. If the Investigator doesn’t make a reasonable effort to search for the possibility of a compromised account, then he may be judged incompetent or negligent.

Without the co-operation of the subject, the Investigator must start an organised search for indications that the email account has been compromised.

Always search for the name of the email service provider and the words ‘hacked’ and ‘compromised’ along with  ‘accounts’ and ‘email’. If you find something, then compare the date of the security breach to the time of your own Weintergate.

Next, search shouldichangemypassword.com, pwnedlist.com, and hacknotifier.com. The first two only tell you if the account might be compromised, while the last one sometimes links the searcher to online information about the security breach.

Of course the Investigator should document the search and explain the sources that were searched.

We often find it prudent to get an agent in another province to requisition federal government documents under the Access to Information Act as we are sometimes seen as adversarial towards government or bureaucratic interests. While we have never had a request denied, we have certainly been delayed because the department involved has guessed for whom we act.

If you need a good picture of the Earltown NS general store, or all pictures by DeadFred.com, or a picture of the DEW Line radar picket ship, USS Investigator(AGR-9/YAGR-9),  then you can find it through flickriver.com.

News reporters are skilled at IIR — some to the exclusion of real journalistic skills if the preponderance of churnalism in the popular media is any measure. However, one instance of a reporter finding the terrorist’s Amazon Wish List is interesting. The reporter was drawing conclusions about the terrorist from the contents of the wish list.

The default Amazon Wish List setting is ‘Public’. The other settings are ‘Shared’ and ‘Private’ which seems to defeat the purpose. The default setting is the most common.

I have just shown you how to search usernames using three good sites. Now in this limited time offer, I will tell you about the best and most secret username search.

Pipl.com for User Names

Go to Pipl.com and put the suspected username in the field normally reserved for a person’s name, and presto, right before your very own eyes, valid results will appear that may include a lot of other vital information about your subject.

NameChk is similar, but it doesn’t search as many sites (158). Be warned, this site doesn’t like Firefox, it is better to use Chrome as a browser.

The advantage of this username search is that it tells you which sites have the username available for use. Conversely, the sites that don’t have the username available might have the user that you are seeking. The sites where the name is taken are the ones that you should investigate further.

Case sensitive searches help when searching a person’s name and certain words such as the month of March, rather than a marching band, or a person from Poland is Polish, not silver polish.

CaseSensitiveSearch.com appeared in April 2013 and provides a case sensitive web search engine based upon the Yahoo! search engine database. However, this search is based on a paid service called BOSS that allows developers to create custom Yahoo! search engines for a fee. In this case, we do not know what pricing plan the developer is on, therefore, we do not know what portion of the Yahoo! index the thing searches.

I found Talkwalker to be better than the broken-down Google Alerts. Mention seemed interesting, but the Web interface was not confidence inspiring and the need to download an app always makes me suspicious of what security risks that would cause.

Now that Google Alerts is working better, I am finding that it is almost keeping up with Talkwalker and finding new material in each set of results.

With the reawakeing of Google Alerts, I am not going to abandon Talkwalker and Mention — I am just going to add them to toolkit.