My partner and I were having a business discussion. We share the same philosophy when it comes to obtaining good information.
“You don’t know something is true until you see it with your own eyes,” I said.
Elrod replied, “You mean humint.”
“What?” I asked.
“Humint,” Elrod repeated. “It’s a military term for human intelligence.”
The technology for society, business, private investigations, and certainly more so for the military, changes rapidly. How do you keep up with it and know which source provides good information? It was this question that the former Army ranger and I were kicking around.
We agree that: Technology is a tool and very good one. Tech can do some amazing things to shrink time and space and to save on manpower. But the best investigative results come from a marriage of technology and human intelligence, using one’s senses to assess a situation and to weigh the various factors or results.
Two tools many private investigators use are databases and GPS. Databases provide address histories and assemble public records information. he pitfall with databases is that they often rely on information the subject provides and may be “stale.” To determine where someone resides, you need to verify it a couple different ways and see them at the residence more than just once. Technology, such as social media or the internet, can also be used to manipulate a situation with false information.
Business, government and private parties use GPS to track movements of goods and personnel. It’s useful in that it can tell you where something is located at any given moment. However, GPS offers no context. You might own a business and have GPS on all the vehicles but you have no idea what those drivers or personnel are actually doing in the field. They might be selling trade secrets or not representing the company in the best light.
One example of technology run amok was the phone hacking scandal perpetrated by News of The World and other tabloids. The papers had relationships with unscrupulous private investigators who were hacking into voicemails of the royal family, business leaders and crime victims.
And yet, in the history of media, where have the biggest scoops come from? Not from short-cuts like phone hacking. Big stories come from industrious reporters who take the time to find documents, see patterns of information and cultivate sources who can confirm information or point them in the right direction.
Elrod brought up a battle in Afghanistan, Roberts Ridge, where technology used in advance failed to detect an enemy. U.S. forces had used unmanned drone planes to perform aerial surveillance but did not detect hostile forces. The enemy understood aerial photography and had dug in to the terrain. Fifteen service members were later killed as U.S. forces kept trying to land helicopters in the area.
“It comes down to human intelligence,” Elrod said. “A computer can’t see and hear things or tell you the nature of an interaction.”
Leave a Reply