What if we taught OSINT to high schoolers?

CHRIS KEMP
Um, they don’t fall for things as easily as adults do sometimes because they’re digital natives. They’ve been raised on the Internet from from day one. They’ve had a device in their hands, and they’ve been they’ve been looking at things.

JEFF PHILLIPS
Welcome to Needlestack. I’m Jeff Phillips, your host for today’s episode.

AUBREY BYRON
And I’m Aubrey Byron, a producer on Needlestack.

JEFF PHILLIPS
So today we’re joined by Chris Kemp. Chris is a retired park ranger who now teaches criminal behavior and crime scene investigation at the high school level. It’s going to be interesting conversation. Chris, welcome to the show.

CHRIS KEMP
Thank you. Glad to be here.

AUBREY BYRON
Chris, you mentioned earlier that you incorporate OSINT in your classroom partly as a tool for engaging students. What about open source helps you get your students engaged?

CHRIS KEMP
The connection to real life events is what really brings it in. Because you can read about fictional stuff all day, but when they can take something that they saw in the news that popped up yesterday, and then they can find out more information than what these news sources revealed using OSINT tools, that’s what really gets them fired up.

AUBREY BYRON
That’s awesome.

JEFF PHILLIPS
That is awesome. So, how do you go about this? Do you break it down into certain skills? Or maybe we’ll just leave it even higher. What kind of OSINT skills are you looking to pass along to them in the classroom?

CHRIS KEMP
So for me personally, we start out with the crime of the day. So I’ll pick something kind of random at the news. Maybe I read it in a newsfeed last night, and we’re going to hit it today. I just read now this was a case in Minnesota where a man killed a registered sex offender, and then he finished him off with a moose antler. That’s going to be tomorrow’s crime of the day. So what I’ll do is sometimes I’ll pick multiple news sources, so we’ll kind of contrast and compare. Does this news source have extra information? A lot of times I notice that the local news sources will have more because they have the boots on the ground. So if it hits the national level, they don’t have their people there. They’re relying on the local people. So you’ll get the better scoop. Sometimes we’ll look at the area that’s mentioned, and I’ll put it into the LexisNexis community crime map. So we’ll see, is this a high crime area? Is this a low crime area? Sometimes we can tell that just based on plugging in the location to Google Earth for geographic intelligence. We had a crime where a person was found in a car.

CHRIS KEMP
He was a homicide victim, but it happened out in the middle of nowhere. There was farmland. So it’s going to be very difficult to find witnesses out on a field out in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes there will be a named suspect, and they’ll mention this person’s name in the news article. So we’ll plug that name into the jail roster of where they arrested in the United States. When a person is arrested, they’re taken to the county jail. So we figure out if it’s a city. We figure out what city that county is in or what county that city is in, and then we’ll plug their name in, and it might reveal more information. Like, maybe this person has an additional charge for felon in possession of a handgun, which means that they have experience with the criminal justice system or felon in possession of drugs or even additional charges that weren’t mentioned in the news article. So I model this behavior to the students, and then we do this every day, and eventually what will happen? They have to do presentations. That’s part of the testing here. So they present on a local crime or a famous homicide or a serial killer or a terrorist group, and then they take the things that I’ve modeled for them, and then they apply that to their presentation, and they present it to the class.

JEFF PHILLIPS
So you’re giving them it’s from I heard things in there. So they’re learning about different databases that are out there and different pivot points. As we say in OSINT, if you got a phone number or an email or, in your case, a conviction. Sounds like they’re doing geo OSINT, if you will. I don’t know if they get into reverse image search and some of these things that people use, but you’re giving them those foundations to go deep.

CHRIS KEMP
Everything that a chromebook can do, we’re trying to always push the envelope with the chromebook. I had a Gen X moment where I had a chromebook activity, and one of the students had their cell phones out. I said, hey, you got to put away your cell phone. You got to get your laptop out. Oh, no, Mr. Kemp. I already did it. See, I downloaded the apps on my phone, and she actually beat the class doing it on her cell phone, which she was familiar with, versus doing it on the chromebook. And it hit me like a brick. I was just like, wow, I was locked into this whole have to use a laptop thing. But no, they could use their cell phones and do it faster.

AUBREY BYRON
Wow.

JEFF PHILLIPS
That is a Gen X moment. That’s brutal.

CHRIS KEMP
Okay. Yeah.

AUBREY BYRON
Since you’re working with real life crimes, is there an ethics element to what you’re teaching as far as the potential for false accusations, things like that?

CHRIS KEMP
I’m very clear in the teaching. Like, when we talk about people in jail, there are innocent people in jail. There are people who are not so innocent, but then they’ve been arrested for crimes that they didn’t commit. They might have committed other crimes that have been undetected. They might be very well guilty. And we can say that after they’ve gone to court and had their day in court. The time where it isn’t the case is when we look at the megan’s Law website, which is for registered sex offenders. And these are people who have been accused of a crime, arrested, convicted, served time, and now they’re released out into the public, and they have to report for the rest of their life. And the big ethical thing that I try and talk about is showing respect, because I’ve had students who have been victims of sex crimes in the classroom, and I don’t want to make things worse on them. But then I have to balance that with teaching the rest of the class how not to be a victim and kind of just as important how not to be a suspect. Because sometimes with teenagers navigating that terrain, there can be misunderstandings.

CHRIS KEMP
So we go over consent and we do these things, but it’s always about doing it in a respectful fashion, because I have students whose parents have been incarcerated, and I don’t want to present this in a way that could be offensive to them and then basically tune them out for the rest of my class.

JEFF PHILLIPS
You mentioned that they’re on Chromebooks and started thinking a little bit about their own Opsec. I know you’re giving them assignments, but what does that angle look like as far as making sure they’re not putting themselves in their information and sharing their profiles? I mean, is there an I take it there’s an opsec level here, and maybe the Chromebooks are super locked down, but what can you say about that as they’re out there investigating some of these things?

CHRIS KEMP
So we keep it very generic. Like, even their emails are by their student ID numbers. They don’t incorporate any names. I don’t have them sign up for any services, and we’re just doing basically passive reconnaissance. I don’t have them use people finder websites like the search websites for that. We’re just doing Google Dorking, and we’re looking at publicly available websites, and we’re keeping it like that because, again, there’s also a maturity angle. They’re still teenagers. Teenagers going to teenage and talk. So I’ve got to recognize that, too.

JEFF PHILLIPS
Let me ask a little bit. You mentioned they give reports. Have you been surprised about what some of these students have been able to go out there and find out, oh, boy, wow.

CHRIS KEMP
Once in a while, they will blow me away, because that’s my favorite part of the day is when they present, because I’m up here and I’m teaching them this, I’m teaching them that. But when they get to present, they’re teaching me things. And that’s really neat because it’s keeping me fresh in the field, and they show me stuff. So one of them recently did a report for the famous killing on the rapper Pop Smoke and how he was killed, and he was actually found using hostile OSINT. He was tweeting a bunch of things because they have to maintain a certain lifestyle and a certain image. So he was tweeting about the money that he had certain expensive luggage, and I believe his manager told him, hey, knock that off. So other people were monitoring the feed, and that’s how they found him. So one of my students did a report on that, and he geolocated the house that Pop Smoke was in based on the shape of the swimming pool. Because you think about it, when houses are built, there’s probably only three or four models, okay? Unless it’s like a luxury custom home. But swimming pools are always custom.

CHRIS KEMP
They’re like an aftermarket accessory, if you think about it. So he found the square swimming pool from one of the photos that was in a news article, went to Google Earth and went through that neighborhood doing overhead views and located the site. And it was just a jaw dropper moment in the class. Yeah.

AUBREY BYRON
Wow. Before the recording, you mentioned a lesson on Disinformation. We actually did a fact checking series last season, and I think analysis and verification are an important part of OSINT. How are you incorporating those subjects in the classroom?

CHRIS KEMP
So I like to have a section, and it’s kind of neat to see because the students, they don’t fall for things as easily as adults do sometimes because they’re digital natives. They’ve been raised on the Internet from day one. They’ve had a device in their hands, and they’ve been looking at things. So that’s a neat part, but I like to use it’s called the Bad News Generator, and it gamifies building bad news and building a following. So we do that for points. I have them go through the assignment and go through the website, and then we pause. There are certain goal posts that you have to hit, and then the game will pause, and I can stop class and explain it. And at the end, the website gives them a score. So I tell them, hey, be the worst human beings you can be, and you’ll get the best score. So they do that, and then we stop it, and we have all the different periods against each other. And then I publish the high scores the next day to see who’s going to be the grand champion versus Misinformation and Disinformation. So they get this competitive edge.

CHRIS KEMP
They get all quiet. And you know, when the classroom gets quiet, either something really bad is happening or something really good is happening. There’s, like no in between. So this is like a good quiet moment where they’re getting really intense on it.

JEFF PHILLIPS
While this show is all about OSINT, it seems like the kids are taking away some other lessons here. They’re learning about Disinformation and misinformation. You mentioned earlier you’re teaching. I think some things are like Google Dorking skills. Do you find that some of these skills, do you hear from them that they’re putting them to use in other areas or in other ways?

CHRIS KEMP
It depends. A lot of them, it’s like a delayed response a lot of times where I’ll have somebody in the class, and you just could never tell. They’ll be quiet to me. They won’t say a word. And then a year later, I’ll bump into them in the hallway and they tell me about how this is the favorite class they’ve had ever, and they tell me about all the things that they do. And then some of them can be very vocal, so it’s really hit or miss. But the goal is to teach them life skills and to not just I’ve heard a term, it’s called in screen we trust and not to trust. That to look and to verify and to vet things and to get a couple of different sources and then draw your own conclusions afterwards. That’s one of the big goals. We have what are called CTE standards. And mine is always the read it right over here. Use electronic reference materials to gather information accurately. And that’s the big standard for the class, to try to get this as an investigative tool. And it’s just amazing to me because it’s a web browser and look at what we can do with this.

JEFF PHILLIPS
That’s awesome.

AUBREY BYRON
Do you find that some of them do become a little more conscious of media consumers?

CHRIS KEMP
I sincerely hope so. But they’ve got an edge to them already, which is kind of neat to see where they’re not going to fall for the Jenkins thing or the kind of fluff that you see on the Internet that a lot of people jump onto and then it gets disproven later, but that they don’t actually catch that it was disproven online. And they still believe that in their mind and kind of hold that in their heart. I think they’re a little bit more immune to that. That’s just a personal feeling that I get.

AUBREY BYRON
I would agree with you there. I think one interesting thing about teaching OSINT at the high school level is that it sort of seems like maybe there’s an added benefit of teaching media literacy alongside that. Because if you’re realizing what you can find on other people, you’re probably realizing what might be out there about yourself. Do you see that any of them change kind of their approach to what they share online?

CHRIS KEMP
Yes. I can usually get a gasp out of some of the students. I have one section where I put up just a random picture that I found on the Internet, but it had the metadata of where that picture was taken with the GPS coordinates that are attached. So we look at the picture and I throw it up there, and it’s a mountainous region. You can see snow and a couple of houses. And so we talk about this like, hey, look, it’s above the snow line. If we really nerd it out, we could probably identify the species of plant. It looks like an American house based on the trash can, but let’s see if we can find out where exactly this picture was done. So I go to the Internet, and I upload the picture, and then we extract the latitude and longitude, and then I plug that into Google Earth. And then we go down to Street View, and then you pivot around the Street View, and you can see it’s a different time of year that the picture was taken, but you can tell almost exactly where the person was standing when they took that photo.

CHRIS KEMP
So then I hit him from the blind side. Okay, now think about this. You just posted a geotagged picture of you at your house, okay? Now. Maybe you’ve got Chester. He’s in his mid 50s. He has a thing for teenage girls. That is highly inappropriate. He knows where you live. Maybe you posted you got your new job. Well, guess what? Now he knows where you work, and you posted where you go to school. These people know all of this stuff about you, and they may not mean the best for you, and now they have information. So think twice about posting these things. And you can see a couple of them are usually like, oh, my gosh, they got the deer and headlights look. And that’s good because they’re hopefully thinking about it, and they’re going to think twice.

JEFF PHILLIPS
No, 100%. It’s the opposite problem. We all worry about. I don’t know about opposite, but a different view. We were just talking, right? I was worried about my parents and them clicking on anything. They got into an email and could be fished to death, right. Or fished out of their entire life savings. On the flip side, these kids are growing up where everything and anything is online. They’re so connected. So definitely those of us in between those two generations, I think we have an advantage being exposed to both sides. But I think it’s going to be interesting to see what these kids, and especially in the OSINT world, how good they’re going to be at this when they get older and start their careers.

CHRIS KEMP
There are some of them they are my people. They cannot let it go. I mean, it is really neat to see where they get all intense, because I’ll give them a project. We’ll watch a newsreel. I said, okay, there’s a house. It’s got a number on it. We know the city that it’s in. What’s the address? Go and so they’ll flip open their chromebooks, and they start looking. And the way I have them do it is I’ll have them Google that number plus the city, and then they go to the images, and then you can quickly scroll through the images and look for compare a house to that. And then as soon as one of them finds it, somebody will raise their hand, and everybody else is slamming their fists down on the desk, and it’s like, oh, yeah, these guys are really into it. And then I’ll throw another curveball at them. Okay, well, the crime happened inside the house on the stairwell. Get me a picture of that stairwell. So they’ll go to Zillow, and they’ll run the address through there and try to look for interior pictures of the house. And it’s really neat to see.

CHRIS KEMP
I think the kids, they over share, but then they’re more skeptical, and it’s an interesting contrast.

JEFF PHILLIPS
That’s very interesting. Now, I think you’d mentioned before we got started, this is actually an advanced class. What are the class levels that they’re going through here that you were telling about earlier?

CHRIS KEMP
So the criminal Behavior class is the introductory class. That’s the theater, and we talk about all the different types of crimes, what motivates people to do them and then how they do them. So they’re getting kind of a life preparation for entering the adult world. And the hope is that they won’t be victims of this. They’ll know what to look out for. Maybe they can save themselves from something, or maybe they can save a family member or a friend. And most of the students take that, and then that’s it, which is good. And then after that, there’s the advanced class, which is the crime Scene Investigations class. And then from there, that’s to prepare them to compete in Skills USA, where they would actually go into an actual police run, simulated crime scene and investigating, lifting latent fingerprints, taking the right pictures, doing the crime scene sketch, writing the report, putting the tape up, all the things that normal CSI people would do. And then they get graded on that. So those are the advanced kids. But I do the OSINT stuff in all the classes, but I demand a little bit more of the advanced ones.

CHRIS KEMP
They’re the ones that I’ll tell. I won’t give them as many hints, and I’ll ask them for more results.

JEFF PHILLIPS
All right.

AUBREY BYRON
Before we wrap up, I wonder, as a teacher, do you have tips for our professional audience in regards to teaching it or just for osin or collection, maybe? I feel like sometimes young people can give us another perspective.

CHRIS KEMP
Okay, how about let’s do both? So, to me, just constantly keeping that interest in it and the passion and not forgetting that it’s fun. It’s fun to do. And just maintaining the interest level is pretty cool. And you have to because the tools come and go, what’s new, red hot, sexy, and six months down the road won’t even work. So you have to constantly be looking for new things. As far as teaching it, you just have to be fearless, because I’ve had lesson plans that have just flopped, and then the bell rings and a new set of students walks in, and you have to be able to shake it off because they’re asking, Mr. Kemp, what are we doing today? And you got to be ready for them. You have to carefully manage your excitement, even if you’re not quite feeling it for the day. And it’s a fun place to be.

AUBREY BYRON
That’s awesome.

JEFF PHILLIPS
Yes, we should all look to apply those things, and being constantly curious is definitely something we all need to keep in mind. Well, thanks to our guest, Chris Kemp for joining us today. If you like what you heard, you can subscribe to our show wherever you get your podcast, watch episodes on YouTube, and view transcripts and other episode info on our website, authentic8.com/needlestack. That’s authentic with the number eight .com/needlestack. And be sure to let us know what you thought of the show on Twitter @needlestackpod and like and subscribe wherever you’re listening today. We’ll be back next time with more OSINT tips to help you with your research.