A bit more about micronational intelligence services

 I forgot to mention a couple of things in last week's posting about micronational spy services.

First off, some techniques commonly depicted in spy movies (like planting listening devices) can be illegal in some areas, as is planting an "air tag" to monitor someone's movements. Don't break the law.

Second, a lot (I think I've seen estimates as high as 80%) of intelligence is actually "OSINT", or open-source intelligence. In other words, it's all about knowing where to look, usually online. Sometimes this is as simple as browsing the website of your target. If they publish photos, you can examine the image attributes - if they haven't sanitized the photo, those attributes can reveal where the photo was taken, the kind of device used, and other interesting information. Another trick is to look for a file called ROBOTS.TXT - it's used to discourage a web crawler for looking in certain directories/files, but it can also tell you where you should look. However, this is starting to blur the line of "hacking", so use this trick with caution - again, don't break the law.

You can also set up various tools to periodically update you on topics of interest. For example, in my "day job" in cybersecurity, I set up a Google keywords alert search that fires every morning at 6am and delivers a summary of news articles in the last 24 hours that included various keywords such as "zero-day" and "hacker", but you could set one up that monitors for mentions of (for example) "micronation" and "Slabovia". You can set up your own Google Alert here.

There are many tools and videos you can use for OSINT - when you start getting into it, it's somewhat scary how much information can be gathered on someone. Please, use this information for good, and don't break the law.

Stock photo from Microsoft O365