Reissued Digital PDF Editions

Posted by Michael Bazzell

We have released official digital PDF versions of OSINT Techniques, 10th Edition (2023) and Extreme Privacy, 4th Edition (2022).

Originally, we only released paperback and hardcover versions of our large textbooks. In 2023, we began a shift and decided to stop releasing print versions of our books. We did not like the exclusivity agreements required by Amazon and their overall monopoly of the self-publishing market. We have always been bothered that an Amazon account was required to purchase books about OSINT and privacy (the irony). We also saw their print quality decline drastically. In February of 2023, we released our first digital PDF guide about mobile devices as part of the Extreme Privacy series. We later released guides about macOS devices, Linux devices, and Firewalls. These were all successful, and each of those include free updates whenever needed.

With this release, we are finally providing official digital PDF versions which are an exact replica of the print books. They are designed for those who prefer a digital experience and want the ability to easily copy text or print a specific page. We respect that a digital version is much easier to access at all times than a 500+ page book, and the full-color screen captures appear nicer than those in the monochrome prints (and pirated versions).

There will be no digital updates to these versions, as we want to preserve the content as originally published. These books offer a very specific glimpse of OSINT and privacy at the time of publication. Even though a few techniques mentioned within them are no longer 100% accurate, we believe that a lot can be learned from the tutorials presented. The OSINT Techniques PDF includes access to the IntelTechniques book portal which offers updated tools and VM commands.

Purchase links:

https://inteltechniques.com/book1.html
https://inteltechniques.com/book7.html

My Irish Exit

Posted by Michael Bazzell

I am no stranger to the Irish Exit. I doubt many of my friends have ever heard me say "I am heading out now" or give any sort of official goodbye at an event. I have always preferred to quietly leave without fanfare or formalities. Several months ago, I gave an Irish Exit to the podcast.

This was not intended, it just happened. I won't go into all of the details, but I will offer some insight. I am very fortunate to have such a diverse range of clients. I am often asked to go off on grand adventures with them after my work is complete. I always politely decline, mostly due to pending obligations or a general desire to keep work and personal life separate. I also just don't fit in with the rich and famous. I find that life uncomfortable. However, I recently decided to unplug from my world, and become a temporary imposter within their world for the last three months.

While away, I stayed off of the internet and asked my staff to handle my email and other communications. It was delightful. I finally realized how much time the podcast, blogs, and constant communications were eating up my life. It is interesting how we adapt to the situations we are in.

I am now up to speed on the rumors. He is dead. He is in a foreign jail. He has cancer. He had a mental breakdown. He was kidnapped in Mexico. He is poor and working at Wendy's. He moved to Russia. I enjoyed all of the disinformation, thank you. However, others do not see the humor. My staff has been bombarded with emails demanding details of my absence, and two relatives were recently contacted via telephone from strangers asking if they had heard from me. Take it easy, creeps.

I assure you I am still here and doing well.

I originally had no intention of explaining my absence or status. I have no endorsement deals. I don’t owe sponsors any shows. I figured I would just walk away for a while. However, I respect that owning a business changes much of that, so here are some responses to the most common concerns.

Online Video Training: No change here. Jason is still delivering updated content every month. I have seen some of the upcoming topics and they beat anything I had in my version. I am truly lucky to have him on board. Jason is committed to the continued growth of the training, and I will still be involved as needed.

Consultations: No change here either. We have not accepted new clients for some time, as we have been focused on finishing all pending second citizenship requests. We will always cater to our active clients. My staff has that under control, and I will still offer my advice when new problems arise.

Books (Print): We currently do not plan on releasing any new print books. The current OSINT (10th) and Privacy (4th) books will still be available on Amazon, but we are not planning new print versions of either.

Books (Digital): The four digital guides we have released have all been successes. I enjoy putting out our own content without Amazon’s hands in it. I will continue to update these guides as promised. No change there. We are also considering the next guides. I have a huge OSINT breach data guide finished which could be the next release. We will also be publishing digital versions of the OSINT Techniques and Extreme Privacy print books. Expect an announcement soon.

Podcast: I have adapted to the no-podcast lifestyle. I like it. I would never say the podcast will not return, as I get bored easily. I will say that it is on an indefinite "hiatus”. Maybe it will become something completely different. Stay tuned and stay subscribed.

Archives: Many listeners are mad that the show archives were removed. I get it. Our host (Soundcloud) refused to allow us to renew our annual subscription, and they dropped us to the free tier. This prevents us from offering old episodes on their platform and is why you only see a single brief episode. Once the shows were removed from Soundcloud, all other podcast apps and services updated from this feed, eliminating their own links to the missing audio files. Yes, I know we could have found a new service, forwarded the feed, uploaded hundreds of gigabytes of wav files, and updated all of the podcast apps, but I did not see the point. Much like I prefer ephemeral messaging, I also kind of like the idea of expiring podcasts. They served a purpose at the time, but they were never meant to be a permanent reference. I hope some of you enjoyed them.

Blog: Jason, Aaron, and I plan to post more often on the IntelTechniques Blog. We know it is not a replacement for the podcast, but it does offer a platform for long-form content. Please monitor the blog itself or subscribe to the RSS feed available there. I already have two drafts close to publication.

In other words, we will always be creating new content, but we are also always looking for the next thing. I believe we should all live our lives as chapters. For me, Chapters One through Four was childhood, adolescence, individualism, and entering adulthood. I never wanted Chapter Five to simply be surviving as an adult until death. I want 100 chapters before I die. Therefore, I have always pivoted whenever it seemed strange to do so. In the spirit of oversharing, this is why I left government work two years before I received a pension, then quit Mr. Robot as soon as we won the awards and season two writing began, then exited the OSINT training space at the height of its popularity, then stopped all public speaking when my agency increased my rate due to demand, then stopped taking new privacy clients when we were receiving the most requests daily, then terminated my relationship with Amazon during our highest royalties, and then stopped the podcast while it was still growing rapidly. A chapter must end before the next can begin. I like going against the grain, even if I am told I am crazy. It allows me to embrace the next thing without overstaying my welcome.

I suspect some conspiracy theorists will speculate that I did not write these words and I am still MIA. I understand the skepticism. If it helps, the "<dc:creator>" field within the RSS feed file will show that this post was from my personal account, the same as the podcast posts. For comparison, the two posts prior to this were from Aaron's account.

What's next? I am not ready to share that, and may never go public with it. I have my aliases established. The shell company is in place. The anonymous payment account is ready. I always naively think I have found the next big thing. Maybe you will have suspicion that I am behind a new project you find. Hopefully, if I do things right, you will not.

The better question is, what is YOUR next chapter?

Thank you for all of the interest in my ridiculous ideas. I am honored to have played a very small role in the privacy, security, and OSINT community.

MB

 

Ubuntu Pro Shenanigans

Posted by Aaron Kelley

Several readers of our OSINT Techniques book and Online Video Training have expressed concern about Ubuntu's new Pro feature and update restrictions for those who do not subscribe to the service. Since we recommend Ubuntu for OSINT virtual machines, we should address the issue and offer some guidance. Let's start with addressing Ubuntu Pro. If you run 'sudo apt update' and 'sudo apt upgrade' within an Ubuntu Terminal, you will likely see something similar to the following.

This warning appears concerning as it insinuates that some updates are being withheld from your machine unless you subscribe to the Pro service. The following warning from Ubuntu's software updater is even more alarming.

This appears to present a lot of outdated software which we cannot update. However, looks can be deceiving. Click on any of these updates and look at the details pane. As one example, I clicked on Ffmpeg and observed the following.

The "Available version" is the exact same product as the currently installed software. The update does nothing. Running 'pro security-status' displays the following.

This confirms that our machine is receiving all Main/Restricted updates until 2027, at which time we would be using Ubuntu 26.04. We do not need extended updates until 2032 as offered through Ubuntu Pro. This makes Ubuntu Pro unnecessary for our needs. Opting to avoid Ubuntu Pro does not restrict your machine from the typical security updates which Ubuntu has always provided. The options available within Ubuntu Pro are enhancements to Ubuntu and no features have been removed from a typical Ubuntu installation. The focus of Ubuntu Pro is to extend the availability of updates from five to ten years, and provide some third-party security patches which may not be available otherwise. We should not be using old versions of Ubuntu for our VMs, so this does little for us within an investigative VM.

Ubuntu Pro is available for free for personal use, but it requires you to attach a unique license key to your Ubuntu installation, which will be tracked by Canonical. We do not recommend this. Instead, we encourage users to remove these unnecessary warnings with the following command.

mv /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20apt-esm-hook.conf /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20apt-esm-hook.conf.bak

After this command, which only renames the file responsible for this warning, updating through Terminal (and therefore the update script we provide within the VM), should appear as follows.

We feel that Ubuntu is being aggressively misleading with the rollout of Ubuntu Pro, and we do not recommend any OSINT users attach this service to their investigative VMs. We have not recommended Ubuntu as a host OS for some time.

Our Emergency Alert Test

Written by Aaron Kelley

Our Los Angeles office recently had the opportunity to test our recommendations for those who wish to avoid mandatory emergency alerts (and test alerts) within their mobile devices, and the results were surprising. On Wednesday, October 4th, 2023 at 11:20 Pacific, three of our devices alerted, but one did not.

There has been many conspiracy theories about how the recent test alert was an attempt by the government to collect data about our locations, but we do not buy into that. We just wanted to know if our settings worked. For our test, we full reset four mobile devices. Two were a Pixel 6A with GrapheneOS default settings. The other two were an Apple iPhone 14 with default settings. All four devices possessed eSIM service from Mint with cellular service from T-Mobile. All four were next to each other with a strong signal. The following settings represent the modifications to each GrapheneOS device. The device on the left had full alerts allowed while the one on the right had everything disabled.

 

The iPhones were similar. The one on the left had everything turned on while the one of the right had all turned off.

 

The time finally came. The GrapheneOS and iPhone devices with alerts enabled both rang loud with the test notification as expected. The GrapheneOS device with alerts disabled stayed silent with no notifications as hoped. The surprise was the iPhone which had all alerts disabled. It also blared a loud tone and presented the test message, even though we informed it not to display any alerts.

This is another reason we prefer un-Googled devices such as GrapheneOS over any Apple or Google stock device. They do what you tell them to do.

The Privacy, Security, & OSINT Show – Episode 306

EPISODE 306-Six New Privacy Strategies

This week I present six new privacy strategies which I have been testing while away for the last three months.

Direct support for this podcast comes from our privacy services, online training, and latest books. More details can be found at IntelTechniques.com. Thank you for keeping this show ad-free.


SHOW NOTES:

INTRO:

None

NEWS & UPDATES:

Travel Update

SIX NEW PRIVACY STRATEGIES:

The anonymous U.S. cash debit card
The anonymous international Bitcoin debit card
Obtain foreign currency at face value for any country
Data removal after ignored requests
Obtain your free premium data broker report
Bypass employment application data sharing


Free Guides: https://inteltechniques.com/links.html

Affiliate/Referral Links:
OSINT Techniques (10th): https://amzn.to/3VIlP74
Extreme Privacy (4th): https://amzn.to/3D6aiXp
Proton Mail: https://go.getproton.me/aff_c?offer_id=7&aff_id=1519
Proton VPN: https://go.getproton.me/aff_c?offer_id=26&aff_id=1519&url_id=277
Fastmail: https://ref.fm/u14547153
VoIP.ms: https://voip.ms/en/invite/Mzc2NjM3
Telnyx: https://refer.telnyx.com/refer/zrfmo
Silent Pocket: https://slnt.com/discount/IntelTechniques