Chapter 4. Drops, Hideouts, Meetups, and Lairs

We'll extend some of the techniques introduced in Chapter 2, Acquiring Intelligence Data, to make RESTful web service requests for geocoding. This will allow us to pinpoint various kinds of secret locations. This will also build on image location processing from Chapter 3, Encoding Secret Messages with Steganography.

We will look at some online datasets that will lead us to more techniques in data gathering. In order to work with a wide variety of data, we will need to add an HTML parser to our toolkit. We'll download BeautifulSoup, since it's very good at tracking down the information buried in HTML pages.

In this chapter, we'll also look at some more sophisticated Python algorithms. We'll start with geocoding services to translate address and latitude-longitude coordinates.

We'll look at the haversine formula to compute distances between locations. This will mean using the math library to access trigonometric...