Chapter 3. Following the Social Network
Intelligence gathering is really networking. It's networking with an avowed purpose of learning something new. It's an essentially social game. Most agents have connections; the more successful agents seem to have the most connections. When you read historical accounts of the British MI5/SIS agent code-named Garbo, you'll see how a vast and sophisticated social network is essential to espionage.
We'll leverage Twitter to gather pictures and text. We'll explore the Twitter Application Program Interface (API) to see what people are doing. The Twitter API uses Representational State Transfer (REST) as its protocol. We'll use Python's http.client to connect with RESTful web services like Twitter.
We can use the Twitter APIs to discover the extent of a social network. We'll try to discern the interactions one person has. We can use this to find the active connections among people. It requires some statistical...
