- [Nicole] Hey everyone. Today's lesson we're going to be looking at offline research. So the aims of this section are to encourage you to think about ways to research and find out what you need beyond using the internet. If you're listening to this then it's been recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic. When obviously it's very difficult to use some of the offline tools mentioned in this section. Hopefully you'll be able to kind of use them in the near future. 

I want to just emphasise though that Corporate Watch is definitely not encouraging anyone to break the law or to put themselves at risk. And what I'm talking about here is for kind of information purposes only. All right. So really great offline places are public libraries. Many of them have useful databases like the FAME one that we introduced in the company ownership section. So you can find out an ultimate owner of a company, you can find out the shareholders really easily, libraries also have archives of newspapers and journals. 

And yeah, I just want to emphasise that you can never underestimate what information can be found very easily in a book like the last few lessons I've been talking about industry mapping and understanding supply chains and this whole textbooks describing that stuff and how systems work. So don't be afraid to go back to basics and look in a book. There are also a number of specialists like copyright in business libraries that have more specific information and I've got some links to resources to those at the end of this lesson. So talking to people, we forget with the internet that this is a thing, but yeah talking to actual humans is one of the easiest and fastest ways to find out what you need. You could save hundreds of hours of research by just talking to the right person in the know. So it might involve talking to an expert in a particular field. It might involve talking to a disgruntled ex-employee just have a think about who might effortlessly have the information you need that you can contact. 

So for example, if you're campaigning against an arms company, maybe talking to someone at campaigning against the arms trade, might just save you days and days of work of trying to understand the arms industry because you can finally, get those answers quickly. So yeah, definitely encourage you to talk to people. Attending events. So I've used the same pictures again here about the Game Fair. So I don't know, in case you haven't seen that last lesson I was talking about Hunt Sabs going kind of undercover at Game Fairs as a way to find out when local Fox hunts might be meeting for the season to get hold of one of these sacred meet cards, which share the dates and the times and the locations of where the hunt is starting. So in terms of attending events, I'm talking here, I guess, about more sort of covert styles. So you're not necessarily being dishonest but you're just not sharing who you are necessarily and you don't have to right? There's no need to share information about yourself. It's not that dishonest to go somewhere and just ask questions. You don't have to share your life story with everyone you meet. But if you are putting yourself in a situation where you are trying to somehow look different or address a kind of different identity to blend in a bit more than it is very useful to kind of have a story prepared just in case anyone asks you something just a little bit about who you are and why you're there. But with any of this stuff the focus should be on asking questions rather than answering them. 

So the best way to find out information about someone is just literally asking them questions and deflecting away from questions about you. And the aim is really to be kind of grey and invisible. So maybe you're wearing some snazzy clothes like these ones so that you fit in effortlessly to the event or maybe you kind of you're trying to look at people that are already there, so it might be waiters or cleaners, or just normal kind of dressed attendees. And you might want to kind of mirror them or whack on and kind of white shirt and black skirt if you want to look waiting staff or something to help you kind of move around more freely. And this is a joke at the end, but it's really true. Never underestimate the power of a high vis jacket. So there's bright yellow jackets. We always think that by looking as bright as possible, you're going to get loads of attention but actually people can go anywhere in a high vis jacket. I remember seeing this guy, he'd always bunk the train by putting on a high vis jacket and getting through the ticket barriers that way. And I was always impressed by that. So yeah, don't underestimate it. 

Okay so this section I'm going to talk about this concept of social engineering. So this is looking at how you can kind of skillfully get information from someone by potentially kind of utilising concepts about human nature. So a lot of the ideas in this field has come from person called Kevin Mitnick who was a hacker who got caught and actually went to prison. And now I think he works for States and companies and stuff like as a security advisor but he wrote this book called "The Art of Deception". And when he was working as a hacker, he always said that the weakest security link is always, always always the human factor. So he would be regularly ringing up receptionists and asking to get put forward to people. And I'll give you some more examples in a second but the kind of premises of what he's talking about is that people really to be helpful. If you speak to a receptionist and you're kind and polite and friendly, they are more than likely going to want to kind of help you out with your questions or finding the right contact you need. The other thing about humans is that they boasting and boosting their egos. And so by asking the right questions someone might reveal some very profitable deal that they're doing or some big business they're working with. Yeah just for the sake of their ego. So what we're doing is we're kind of utilising these factors of human nature to get information we need by asking skillful questions. So an example from his book, for example, is he I think he would call a receptionist and he would say, okay, "This is Tony from LLR Security. I really need to speak to a security advisor. I did meeting with him last week I've lost his business card." And then bang! That receptionist tells Tony who the security advisor is. And then he calls again. And then he gets asked to go straight to that guy. Or maybe he's been told the extension number so that he can talk directly to the security advisor. And then maybe he's lying. And he's like, "Oh, this is the phone engineers LLR having problems on the line. Can you just give me the access code." And good old security advisor thinks this guy's already been vetted by the receptionist and actually he's played them off against each other. 

So again I'm not encouraging people to break the law or to be dishonest or anything else, but I think it's worth reading this book and understand humans and ways just to kind of access information that we need. So you might have to consider things like how to gain someone's trust the kind of confidence you carry. I remember someone in the campaign I was involved in against this animal testing company. They would call up the accounts department of the lab and they would have an incredibly posh English accent that they could do really well. And they would just be like "I'm the biggest shareholder I need to speak to dah, dah, dah you need to tell me how you're doing financially." And this poor accounts manager would just be blubbering giving us all the answers that we needed. I remember another time an example was we were doing a demonstration and the company had closed all their doors and offices and put a sign up saying that they were closed for the day. And someone literally just called them from their mobile and said, "Hi, I'm around the street. And I'm around the corner. And I can see these crazy protesters outside. Can I see you or not, what's going on? When can I meet you?" And they were like, "Yeah, they'll be gone in 10 minutes. Don't worry the police are coming. Then you can come round." And so we knew they were in the office, then we stayed and kept doing the demo or whatever. So yeah, you can use these little calls as a way to get a little useful but some information like dropping it can be useful and playing into people's kind of biases and their privileges. There might be options for kind of tours of buildings, for example, or like events. The other option is that if you're calling someone they might very quickly Google you. So you want to have a kind of avatar on the internet that is Googleable. So if you tell them you're a Financial Times journalist, maybe you've used the name of another Financial Times journalist. So they'll look at you and they'll think, okay, she's legit. Let's talk to her. And again, it's all about kind of social proof of who you are and what you're doing. And when we do these workshops in real life, the activity I encourage people to do is just to practise getting information out of someone. And if you're the person that's not meant to give away information, you can see how difficult it is to not share information about yourself. Like to just be rude or to just be like I don't want to talk about that. It's so damn difficult. So if you are watching this as part of a group or you have a housemate or something that you can talk to, just have a practise one of you be someone that is trying to get some information and the other one be the person who's trying to not share anything and see how difficult it is. But yeah, I think you can find this book online very easily. 

Okay so I just wanted to talk a little bit about physical surveillance. So lots of grassroots campaigns have used these tactics to find out information about a company. So maybe it's observing a factory, literally sitting on the side of the road and watching them maybe looking at the cars in the car park, their suppliers the people mixing their cement, whoever it is it's a useful way of identifying suppliers and customers. Some people look through the bins of an office look through their recycling as a way to get information on contracts or for example all around the world this happens with investigative journalists and stuff. You might have to follow a logging truck for several hours to see, where it eventually ends up to help identify the company. And yeah, just a little case study of this there was a campaign in Brighton against an arms factory and the campaign was called Smash Edo. And when they were, they had a really big court case where they had several trials, but they had one particularly big court case. And the company would, I think denying their involvement in some particular operation. And the campaign actually shared some paperwork that had been given to them by someone that they think had got it from a bin. So that was quite interesting example of how that can be useful. 

But obviously any kind of physical surveillance risks, there can be dangerous like legal risks involved. So you might need to be kind of skillful with that to not be classed as harassment or something or stalking or whatever. And also there could be dangers involved, especially if you're in different countries and different territories. So there's an interesting thing about physical surveillance as a form of self defence against state repression it's got a kind of counter surveillance advice. So if the cops or something, we're having you under surveillance things you could do to resist that. But I think the guide also has useful tips and tricks for surveillance like understanding surveillance in and of itself. And many organisations share kind of best practises for investigative journalists and people and legal guidelines around this kind of stuff. So the National Union of Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, they've all kind of got information on this stuff. Okay so that's it on this lesson. If it is safe and practical for you to do so, you could maybe try and think about how this can build onto your company profile. Maybe you could go, and I don't know if you're doing a company profile about H and M. Maybe you could go and sit where all the workers have their cigarettes and ask some questions at lunchtime or whatever or maybe you could practise what I mentioned about with the exercise of sharing information or avoiding sharing information. Yeah so again have an experiment, come back to your research goals, do what is useful, try and save yourself time. There's no point doing unnecessary research. But think about creatively using some of these options.