INVESTIGATIVE TIPS AND RESOURCES

Amazons Mechanical Turk Upload any document and hire people at low
rates to do whatever research you need (text-mining, data analysis, etc.)

Public records
- BRB Publications (Excellent resource with links to tons of public records
federal, state, county, city)
http://www.brbpub.com/freeresources/pubrecsites.aspx
- Portico (Another excellent guide everything from reverse lookups to
currency converter, state medical boards to international phone
directories) http://indorgs.virginia.edu/portico/
- Reporters Desktop http://www.reporter.org/desktop/

Domain searches
- domaintools.com
- allwhois.com

Political investigations
- legistorm.com (salaries, travel)
- maplight.org (cash and votes)
- congrelate.org (tracking lawmakers votes and $)
- opensecrets.org/pfds (personal financial disclosure)
- publicintegrity.org/StateDisclosure (state financial disclosure)
- fec.gov (from the source)

Search engines use at least three besides Google
- Dogpile.com
- Alltheweb.com
- Twingine.com
- Clusty.com

People search (addresses, phone numbers, emails, etc.)
- Pipl.com
- 123People.com
- Zabasearch.com
- Criminalsearches.com

Social media searches
- SocialMention.com
- Whostalkin.com
- Samepoint.com
- GPSed.com (track usernames by location)
- Youropenbook.org (searches Facebook)

Business and corporation searches
- Slideshare.net (search PowerPoint slides)
- LinkedIn Groups (free with basic log-in, good for tracking current issues,
events)

Relationships and networks
- Theyrule.net pick a corporation and comes up with network of board of
directors, shows connections, builds out relationships
- Muckety.com 100,000 individuals and 60,000 companies and
organizations
- AnalyzeThe.us data is campaign finance data from CRP and lobbying
info from Senate office
- Analytictech.com/ucinet simple relationship maps

Twitter tools for journalists
- Twittertim.es
- Twtvite
- Wefollow
- Hootsuite
- Search.twitter.com/advanced
- Localtweeps

iPhone Apps
- 5-0 radio, pro police, firefighters and EMS scanner
- QIK or QIK Pro Plus (video camera)
- Dropbox (online file storage)

Interesting sites
- PCAT (search public comments to proposed regulations)
- DocumentCloud (better than Scribd and docstoc for uploading PDFs and
other documents)
- Federal Audit Clearinghouse (search any audit:
http://harvester.census.gov/sac/dissem/accessoptions.html?submit=Retrie
ve+Records)

Unsung government resources
A-133 Report from Federal Audit Clearinghouse (every org that gets govt $)
- Part 3, section 4 sufficient deficiency (Georgetown lost government-
funded lab money, anonymous grants were really CIA-funded research

OMB Clearinghouse
- FBI launching prescription drug database
- DHS replacing natural citizenship documents

SBA
- Individual loan data, data on misuse of recover funds


Air travel consumer report (airconsumer.dot)
- Monthly report on which airlines and airports have the most delays,
cancelations, deaths, pets killed, lost luggage


Google tips
- Advanced search (narrow down results on breaking news events by
excluding unwanted terms)
- Search by file type (filetype: pdf, filetype:pptx, filetype:vsd)
- Wonder wheel search tool
- Timeline tool (though you cant search within a range of dates a la Nexis,
this tool comes pretty close and can be useful with breaking news events)
http://www.google.com/search?q=BP+MMS&hl=en&tbo=1&output=search&sourc
e=lnt&tbs=tl:1&sa=X&ei=pgEZTMimLYOB8gbL_pnpDA&ved=0CBYQpwU