Investigative Skills Transfer: Missing Persons Cases as a Training Ground for Global Intelligence
Finding a missing person is like searching for a needle in a haystack; this haystack is no different than intelligence analysis, where the key insights and crucial information that is necessary for actionable intelligence is difficult to locate. — VEEXH
TOPICS
- Intelligence Analysis for Missing Persons
- Missing Person Investigation Breakdown
- Platforms for Training
INTELLIGENCE ANALYSIS FOR MISSING PERSONS
Intelligence is the tradecraft concerned with maximizing critical thinking, amplifying perception, and overcoming biases through rigorous self-reflection and mental strengthening. These necessary steps serve as the foundation for a consciously aware mind prepared for daily analytical work.
The reason is that the human mind is the ultimate tool that the analyst must learn to utilize fully to become proficient in turning raw information into intelligence. The mind has its own set of challenges as humans are not without fault; our minds are susceptible to a myriad of challenges daily; analysts also face their daily struggles; these everyday situations, no matter how minute, affect the mind to some degree. So, analysts must first take a balanced approach to learning to think critically.
A Balanced Approach to Critical Thought
Intelligence analysts should be self-conscious about their reasoning process. They should think about ‘how’ they make judgements and reach conclusions, not just about the judgements and conclusions themselves. (Heuer, 1999, p. 31).
Being self-conscious is the first step in taking a balanced approach to intelligence analysis; it allows for more excellent self-reflection and introspection regarding the activities carried out daily; the daily stress of life can be alleviated by having a heightened sense of self-awareness that allows for a continual process of information throughout the day but to avoid an overload of information the necessary steps must be taken to maximize downtime as this is an essential step in recuperating the mind which allows for the process of mapping out information much more effectively.
Furthermore, a balanced approach to intelligence analysis equips analysts with the ability to identify critical requirements in missing-person investigations. By being self-aware and calm, analysts can make crucial judgments and ask the right questions when outlining the criteria for successfully reuniting the missing individual with their family.
This leads to being able to accurately frame the 5 W’s for asking questions and brainstorming at the beginning of an investigation.
- Who: Who are the key individuals or groups that may possess critical information about the missing person’s disappearance or current whereabouts?
- What: What patterns or anomalies in the missing person’s recent behavior, communications, or financial transactions warrant immediate scrutiny?
- Where: Where are the strategic locations for gathering high-value information, based on the missing person’s known habits, relationships, and last confirmed activities?
- When: When did notable deviations from the missing person’s established routines or expected behaviors first become apparent?
- Why: Why does this particular disappearance stand out from typical missing persons cases, and what unique factors might influence the investigation’s approach?
THE INTELLIGENCE CYCLE
Self-awareness is a personal attribute and a crucial element in the intelligence cycle. This standard analytical process for turning raw information into intelligence involves five steps, with a total of seven. The last two steps are consumption and feedback. Here are the five steps broken down for investigating missing people.
Planning and Direction
The intelligence cycle’s planning and direction phase is of utmost importance as it sets the foundation for the entire process of answering intelligence requirements. Analysts should be thorough during this phase, ensuring that the essential requirements arrived at during brainstorming are precise. This phase is helpful because it allows analysts to define the necessary problem they’re trying to answer and the problems that may arise during the analytical process. A great technique to utilize at this phase is the key assumptions check.
Collection
Moreover, in the collection phase, analysts propose and structure the necessary methods to gather the requisite information. The information collected during this phase of a missing persons investigation is primarily open source information, but not limited to open source, as information sourced from humans provides crucial insights into mapping together the missing pieces; this can be interviewing family members, friends, and colleagues. It may also be necessary to pay for open source information such as clinical records or a history of involvement with law enforcement if those arise as an essential means to answer the questions arrived at during the planning phase.
Note
A collection of too much information is unnecessary. Keep it concise to answer the intelligence requirements; an overload of information wastes time, and filtering and analyzing all of that during the analysis phase can cause a deviation away from answering the intelligence requirements.
Processing and Exploitation
The raw information collected during collection must be processed, cleaned, organized, and placed in a format that allows for proper analysis. This can involve structuring the information gained from human sources and removing any noise; noise simply refers to misleading or irrelevant information. It can also include utilizing diagrams and connecting the dots between any open-source information of the missing person.
Analysis
Correspondingly, the analysis phase of the intelligence cycle is what makes sense of the cleaned information for the analyst to apply analytical methods to derive meaning from the information obtained; this phase requires the most analytic rigor and critical thought combined with structured analytic techniques to turn raw data into intelligence and adequately prepared for dissemination to key stakeholders or policymakers but, in the case of missing person investigations, the analyst hands this intelligence over to law enforcement.
There are no differences between the analysis phase of a missing persons investigation and an analysis of biowarfare or threats toward a country. The analyst can use all of the techniques employed here in any scenario. However, the vital thing to remember here is to avoid getting too attached to the missing person, as emotions tend to allow biases to creep in, diminishing the quality of the intelligence product.
Structured Analytic Techniques and Biases
Dissemination
This phase of the intelligence cycle is where the completed intelligence product and the key requirements posed during the planning phase are answered and handed off to law enforcement to strengthen their search for the missing person, fill in intelligence gaps, and overcome any intuitive traps they may have been unaware of during the investigation.
MISSING PERSON INVESTIGATION BREAKDOWN
TARGET
Tanya Buckland is a missing woman from Australia who has been missing since 2013, a long enough time frame to use as an example of a complex investigation because time is the most essential thing in a missing persons investigation.
At the point that you’ve established a target, there is no difference in how you begin an investigation for a missing person, it’s the same as beginning an investigation of a terrorist or a drug trafficker; they all leave behind a digital trail, and they all have family members, friends, and someone concerned about them. Yet, a targeted missing persons investigation always starts with the immediate family members, who have the closest emotional bond. Now that such a bond is no longer, they’re in a negative state of turmoil and only looking for solace, which means they will seek help from the general public, which falls under the category of open-source information.
Also, at this point, you may be tempted to use Google Dorks to pinpoint information after reading the background of the missing person from the police report. While Google Dorking is a suitable method, it’s slow compared to AI like Perplexity, which delivers clear and concise information with direct links to the information you’re searching for.
Facial Recognition
With the populated photos, it’s always best to run them through a facial recognition database to see if they appear on any existing social media sites of the missing person.
Another good tool is Crawl4AI, a Python library that simplifies the web crawling and data extraction process and can implement language models (LLMs) and AI applications. Thanks to new collection methods, searching the web for interconnected information is no longer cumbersome but seamless in the intelligence age.
Note
Additionally, the setup of a SOC Puppet account for searching social media is crucial; these accounts can be throw-away accounts that have a one-time or limited amount of usage for searching for information across social media, soc puppet accounts should have no information that links back to your original identity, it should stand alone as it’s own persona with a viable story. Also, never use the sock puppet account to interact with the social media of the missing person, family member, or friends.
Social Medias
When searching the Help Find Tanya Buckland Facebook group, it becomes apparent that it’s run by Tanya’s mother, which is a good pivot point for finding any other social media accounts of her mother. It’s also easy to obtain the names of her mother, father, and other relatives from perplexity and web crawling, but entering social media groups or even private ones always present information in the comment sections that law enforcement may not be privy to.
A lot of information can be obtained from Tanya’s, her mother’s, and her father’s social media accounts, but for the sake of privacy, I will not reveal it.
Crucial Information
At the point of her disappearance, she had connections to a known murderer and other affiliates of his. Such information also comes up during web searches, but for family members and friends to corroborate the information means that it’s a vital source. Don’t allow such a crucial piece of information to enable biases to creep in; just because she has affiliations with known criminals doesn’t mean that such an individual is immediately responsible for her disappearance.
Digging Deeper
Additionally, to find more information, use Facebook breach data to locate an email address. Once the email address is found, input it into OSINT.Industries and pivot on sources of information that are found through searching.
One of the best breach data tools out there is Leak OSINT Bot via Telegram, in addition to the popular Facebook Breaches that are easily found via the DarkNet.
Because Tanya is missing from Australia, it’s always best to utilize country-specific resources that may have information not available to foreign resources.
https://start.me/p/L10kJ6/australian-osint
You Can’t Do This Alone
As an analyst or investigator, it’s essential to understand that you will miss out on critical pieces of information when conducting investigations alone as opposed to with a team; having a team allows for deeper brainstorming, collaborating, and argument of different viewpoints, which allows for better perception into the investigation. Some missing persons’ investigations are emotionally daunting, similar to global intelligence, as time is typically of the essence.
There are crucial deadlines that analysts must meet to give the decision-makers the intelligence they require to make timely and accurate decisions. It takes a lot of time to think. Team members are there to help you push to the end to deliver an intelligence product to law enforcement that can answer the difficult questions posed at the beginning of the initial analysis.
PLATFORMS FOR TRAINING
These are some of the best platforms for learning skills to conduct investigations and build critical thinking. They are where you learn how to go above and beyond. Going above and beyond is a testament to self-sacrifice, which is crucial as an analyst; you must shed your biases to allow your mind to view the entire investigation from start to finish clearly. Furthermore, continual practice is one of the best ways to become a better analyst; always strive to improve, as intelligence is an ever-evolving tradecraft.
