Preliminary Vetting: Keeping the Riffraff Out of Your Group
There is a lot to a proper vetting process. This is how you keep from wasting your time.
As we’ve been discussing, real vetting takes time. It’s a structured, carefully planned and executed process that involves discretion, savvy, and a very good understanding of how people are wired.
Far too many groups do little to no vetting at all, and then try to take on actions that end up going poorly, making the group look bad, or even get the group arrested or a member harmed. While many might blame outside forces such as opposing groups or government agents, the truth is that most ineffectiveness and/or bad outcomes are rooted within the group itself.
Today we’ll talk about the preliminary stage of vetting and what that looks like. This stage is necessary whether you’re using a closed or open recruiting model, and it doesn’t matter how intense your activities plan to be. This is literally the bare minimum of what needs to be done before even thinking about allowing someone into your group.
Setting Up For Success
Before you start looking around for prospects, make sure you’ve already done the internal work necessary on yourself and your own group. All of the following questions should have definitive, verbalized answers. You can read previous articles here to understand how to dig for these answers.
What is your own motivational weakness? How do you personally seek validation? How does that come into play with your group activities?
How important is it to you that the world knows you’re in the group and/or doing the activities you’re doing?
What are your group goals?
What do you need in order to achieve them, and how close are you?
Who are the people already in your group? How do they manifest their need for validation, and what are their weaknesses and strengths?
What specialized skill sets are you missing?
What type of person would fill the gaps in your dynamic and group capability? What’s your ideal member look like?
What are the non-negotiables you HAVE to have, and what things are automatic no-go’s for you?
Are you and your group willing to take immediate and decisive action to remove a member if they are not a good fit?
Have you already pared down your existing group of any problem members and handled any internal drama?
Until you can discuss the above questions, you shouldn’t be recruiting at all, let alone trying to set up a vetting process.
Phase 1: Who Are They Online?
I have yet to find a person who doesn’t use the internet in any capacity whatsoever. Most of us use it many times a day especially on our smartphones—and sometimes that is someone’s main access point for the internet.
In forensic science, there is something called Locard’s Principle of Exchange, which essentially states that whenever there is contact between two people or items, each party leaves a trace. Many criminal cases are solved because of this principle, and it’s given rise to an entire process of evidence collection specifically geared toward finding and analyzing those traces.
A piece of trace evidence might be a thread on a victim’s body that matches the inside of a murderer’s van, or a speck of blood on a suspect’s shirt that came from the victim. These traces show contact, and often act as proof in a case.
Locard’s Principle was not designed for vetting, or even online activity, but it still applies to some extent. When you use the internet, regardless of the device, you often leave a trace of yourself. (The sites certainly leave a trace on your device as well, but that’s a whole other article.)
When looking at someone’s online activity, you may not be able to find every site they use or everything they do. That would require doing things that are both immoral and illegal, and you’d need special skills that only a few people have.
What you can do, however, is look for the traces they have left throughout the internet that are in the open. Most people do all kinds of things on the internet that are out in the open and they don’t even think about it once they leave the site. Those are the things you’re looking for.
Comments left on articles or posts
Online accounts on various sites
Information that can be gleaned from profiles
If this sounds pointless, let’s get into some of the things that you as a group leader or member can find out about a prospect just from following them around online. You might be surprised at how easy it is for a layperson to do.
Billy
Let’s say that you’re looking at a guy named Billy. He’s active in his church, seems totally on board with your group’s mentality, and is a solid family man with a devoted spouse and five well-behaved children. Billy says he has a lot of medical and prepping skills, and that works out since your group has a rule that every new member needs to already be prepping and have at least one other specialized skill to bring to the table.
Once you start digging, however, you find that Billy’s email address is attached to an account on some prepping forums asking just last month how to get free basic first aid training for himself. That means Billy is probably not being honest with you about his skills.
He also has a profile on some sexually themed sites that leave no doubt he’s either actively engaged in extramarital affairs or seeking to be. Lastly, some of his comments on other forums and local news articles are angry, confrontational, and even borderline threatening.
Sara
Sara is a great prospect. She presented you with a ham radio license, intelligently discusses communication topics, and is well-versed enough so that you’re comfortable she really knows what she’s doing. That’s even more impressive when you know she’s a college student in a highly demanding STEM program. She is smart, capable, and would be a great addition.
Digging into Sara’s online activity seems pretty pointless but you do it anyway, and find her on a forum for aficionados of mind-altering substances. Turns out that Sara is using stimulants to get through her program and is commenting on threads about how to create them.
Jack
This guy is experienced, knowledgeable in a variety of subjects, and seems like a solid addition. You’re so impressed, in fact, that you’re positive you won’t find anything negative in his online activity.
Except you do. Jack comments a great deal on racist group sites, and while he’s never talked about these beliefs to you or anyone else in the group, online is a different story. Jack hates everyone who doesn’t look like him—and your group is ethnically diverse.
In addition, he’s been on some mental health forums talking about suicidal ideations, and the medications he takes for his bipolar disorder.
The above examples and hundreds more like them are the exact reason why you need to already understand yourself, your group, and your goals—and why these checks are so necessary. Each of these people bring a high level of risk to the table, and before you make a decision on them you need to understand exactly what you’ll be taking on and how it can affect your group goals.
Billy has temper and integrity issues, and lots of room for someone to leverage those secrets against him. He will also be a liability in crunch scenarios.
Sara may be involved in illegal drug-related activities—also leverageable. There’s also no guarantee her mind will be clear when you need her at a moment’s notice.
Jack is mentally unstable and a true racist. He will cause drama at best, secretly seething about others in the group. If he decides to stop taking his meds or runs out of them in a survival scenario, he will be a total wild card.
All of these people looked good at first glance, and yet it would be a highly undesirable thing to have them in your group.
Finding the Needle in the Haystack
The internet is a pretty vast place. How are you supposed to find all of these forums and profiles and accounts and even begin to start looking for people?
To be fair, some folks take more work than others, but there’s a (very) basic process you can use to get started. This won’t catch everything by any stretch, but as you get better you’ll find more tools to use—and get faster and more efficient at it.
Trumail.io - Put their email into this search engine. It’ll tell you if it’s a real email, if it’s a paid or free account, and other information.
Username Search - If you know a username they use online, put that into this site. It’ll give you a list of sites where that username is registered. Then you can go to each site and see if you can view the profile. Pay attention, though, because some usernames are common and some aren’t. You’d be surprised at how many people have a username with something identifying in it, such as tacking their birth year onto the end or making the username something about their favorite hobby. Look to see if you can link the username to them; if your prospect for your Philadelphia-based group rebuilds Mustangs in his spare time and was born in 1972 then ‘phillymustang72’ is probably your guy wherever you see it.
People Search Sites - Spokeo, Mylife, Radaris, Whitepages, Intelius, BeenVerified, Acxiom, Infotracer, Lexis Nexis, TruePeopleSearch are all good places to start looking for people. If you’re serious about finding info, have one paid account off this list and use the other free accounts to confirm or disprove information.
State Court Records - Start with your own state, and branch out to other states you know they’ve lived in. Some states, such as California and North Carolina, don’t allow you to see case details and charges, but many states do.
Sex Offender Search - This is also something that should be checked on every single person.
This isn’t an all-inclusive list. There are many, many more tools.
You can also check property tax records to confirm they own their home and that they’re up to date on their taxes. Not being up to date can signal financial issues—also a leverage point.
Ancestry - Genealogy websites are often a gold mine for information; you can often get a date of birth, other states they’ve lived in, etc.
As I mentioned, this is a very barebones list. You’ll find more things to look at, more sites to visit, more tools as you go.
It takes time—a lot of time. In future issues we’ll talk about linguistic analysis and how to break down what you find, to gain deeper insight into the level of threat someone is and expose their motivators. For now, however, start practicing with the tools above.
If you haven’t already done the mental work on yourself and your own group, however…do that first.
In the next issue we’ll discuss how to choose activities for your cause. How do you know what to get involved in? How can you come up with good ideas that will further your cause? Subscribe now to find out.
Kit Perez is a counterintelligence and deception analyst, and the co-author of Basics of Resistance: The Practical Freedomista. She is currently working on her second book, which will focus on group activism efforts.