Tracing Disinformation With Custom Tools, Burner Phones and Encrypted Apps

Then there are burner phones. They’re useful, and you get to sneak around like a secret agent when you’re buying one. To make sure it cannot be traced, you need to pay in cash, never register it with your own name or real email and never connect it to your home or work Wi-Fi network. I have two at the moment. One is a cheap smartphone, and the other is a flip phone.

What other tech do you find useful for your job?

CrowdTangle is incredibly useful for tracking how information spreads on social media. SimilarWeb is great for web analytics. DomainTools is essential for online forensics. LexisNexis is crucial for finding phone numbers and home addresses.

If I had to pick one account to keep, it would be my professional account on LinkedIn. The network is invaluable when you are looking to track down people inside a specific organization or industry. And it is amazing how people will sometimes use their LinkedIn pages to describe in detail specific projects they worked on, including highly classified government programs. There’s no single better place online to ferret out sources.

You broke the Cambridge Analytica story last year. Have you modified your own social media use since?

I’ve definitely had my paranoid moments. After the Cambridge story broke, when Facebook’s stock price was in free fall, I got to thinking about how Facebook had 11 years’ worth of my private messages, photos and posts. I panicked and started deleting things. It took about an hour for me to chill out and realize that if I wasn’t going to delete my whole profile, a couple of half measures were not going to make a difference.

I’ve since found that keeping the profile was more useful than not. I still have old friends messaging me there, and I need it for reporting. Facebook is simply too good at connecting people. It’s why it makes so much money off our data.

I have cut back on social media, though not because of the Cambridge story or other reporting on big tech companies. Some of my reasons were not particularly unique: I found it less and less satisfying, and I began to worry about the immense amount of time I was wasting. If you think Instagram is a time suck, wait until you’re the oldest person on TikTok.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/technology/personaltech/disinformation-politics-reporting.html?emc=rss&partner=rss