Digital investigation techniques with Craig Silverman

Craig Silverman
There are places that describe themselves as a marketing or PR firm that are basically just kind of disinformation for hire, that’s become now an inseparable part of the political process in the Philippines.

Shannon Ragan
Welcome to NeedleStack, the podcast for open source research. I’m your host, Shannon Ragan.

Aubrey Byron
And I’m Aubrey Byron, producer and co-host Today. We’re discussing the overlap between investigative journalism and open source research techniques.

Shannon Ragan
And joining us for that discussion today is Craig Silverman, a national reporter for Propublica and the author of the Digital Investigations newsletter. Craig, thank you so much for being on.

Craig Silverman
Hey, thank you for having me.

Aubrey Byron
So you write a newsletter that includes a lot of OSINT resources as well as digital investigation ones. In your experience, are fellow reporters utilizing tools and techniques associated with OSINT for investigative journalism?

Craig Silverman
Yeah, I think a lot of journalists, especially investigative journalists, end up doing a lot of things or using tools that would fall under the umbrella of OSINT. But I think a lot of them probably aren’t familiar with the term OSINT or the sort of concept of that. It’s just sort of you’re doing your investigative work, you’re trying to find people, you’re trying to find documents. And I think inevitably, good reporters and good investigators end up doing some of the tools and some of the techniques, particularly when it comes to searching. They may not know what a Google Dork is, but they do it, and hunting down people and information is a key part of it. At the same time, there’s definitely been a really big growth over the last maybe five, six years where newsrooms are actively seeking out people with these skills. So I think the earliest newsroom that probably was doing it was the BBC. They had what was called a user generated content hub, and now it’s called BBC Verify, which is an even larger team. And so you had people who had really good skills with digital verification of images of geolocation, who understood how to navigate social networks and search and find that’s.

Craig Silverman
Like, that was very early on. And slowly now. I mean, look, we see visual investigation teams at the New York Times, at the Washington Post. There’s a new one starting up at the Financial Times, organizations like Bellingcat, of course, which are really rooted in OSINT. And so, yeah, that’s a long way to say I think a lot of journalists are doing it, but there’s still a very small number who would have familiarity with the concept of OSINT and feel connected to that community. And so we still, I think, actually have a lot of work to do to spread the skills of kind of the 101 beyond the investigative teams, beyond the specialists and newsrooms, and to get it to every journalist, because these skills should be applied across any beat or any area. It’s really fundamental stuff as far as I’m concerned.

Aubrey Byron
Yeah, I think obviously your organization and you mentioned the visual investigations team at NYT are doing incredible work, but I don’t really see the techniques sort of being developed at places like my local paper. Do you think that those skills can trickle down there, or is that really out of reach, especially for the current state of the industry?

Craig Silverman
Right, yeah. It’s hard to sort of have that conversation without acknowledging the gigantic dumpster fire that is media business in most centuries. Right, yeah. I mean, it’s brutal on the day. We’re talking Jezebel, which was a long time website that was very popular and successful financially and in so many other ways, was just shut down today. Everybody laid off along with other people at that company.

Aubrey Byron
I didn’t even see that. Wow.

Shannon Ragan
Dagger.

Craig Silverman
Oh, I’m sorry. I’m freaking awful news to you. I’m so sorry. Yeah, I mean, it’s horrible. And also, I remember when it launched, I remember the old days of blogging and gawker, and that was an important time for me. And yet the struggle is massive to find sustainable revenue models. And so when we talk about getting these skills into smaller newsrooms, one challenge is just like, who’s going to train people and who’s going to pay to train people, because the newsroom itself is not going to have money to do that. And they certainly don’t have money to hire a specialist reporter in this. So, you know, the only place I know that sort of fits that bill in some ways is the Baltimore Banner, which is a digital startup in Baltimore where they hired Brenna Smith, who was at the New York Times Visual Investigations team and is bringing these skills to sort of local reporting. And so it’s very rare, and there have been organizations and efforts by funders in the journalism world to kind of spread these skills. And it usually happens in advance of an election. There’s workshops offered, virtual ones, but it’s a really big challenge.

Craig Silverman
And I do a lot of workshops for newsrooms and journalism organizations, and it’s still really surprising to me when I get in a room with journalists. And it could be a range of experience, but if I ask them how many people in this room have used reverse image search, it’s still not 100% people putting up their hand. And I don’t care what beat you’re on. There are certain things you need to know and certain things you need to be able to use in your reporting work. So we’ve got a big challenge with training, and part of that is the financial limits. There’s just way fewer reporters, there’s way less money for training. And getting this to journalists is hard. So it’s a big difficulty.

Shannon Ragan
Yeah. So for you, that is kind of bridging the gap of journalism and OSINT. How did you start getting more into the OSINT sphere, recognizing that’s what you were doing? Did you receive training or kind of support from your organization or did you have to go alone.

Craig Silverman
I guess it was kind of alone. And I’ve had a staff job for a while now at Propublica and I was at Buzzfeed News before that. But I was freelance and self employed or at startups at times for most of my career before that. And so a lot of it was kind of roll your own. And my weird path to it started in 2004. I launched a blog called Regret the Error that reported on Corrections and Mistakes and Accuracy in Media. It was kind of a media watchdog blog, but at the same time I was really interested in fact checking and verification and how do we know what we know, how do we get things right? How do we improve our process to reduce error? And over time, as I was very interested in sort of old school fact checking, we get to maybe around 2010, 2011. And obviously things are really different because of the growth of social media. And suddenly so much information is public. It’s not going into a newsroom to be talked about and verified and sort of packaged for distribution. It’s already out there. It’s things, people at an event, tweeting and what have you.

Craig Silverman
And so the challenge around verifying and working through that abundance of information became a really big focus for me. And so that’s when I sort of shifted my focus a little bit towards that, of understanding these emerging skills. A lot of it was just talking to people, doing this work, people at the BBC, at Storyful. And in 2014 we published the first edition of the Verification Handbook, which is in some ways, I guess, a very early OSINT manual. But I had no idea what the term was at that time. And I feel like I only heard it for the first time maybe even, I don’t know, a few years ago. It, I think, comes more from the military and private investigative world, which I wasn’t super connected to. But all of a sudden I found people in these different fields were using the tools and techniques that we had talked about there. And there was a lot for us to learn from them and for them to learn from us. And so I think this OSINT world I still feel is kind of new to me, to be honest. And I’m just enjoying meeting people and learning more from it and seeing what I can pull from that for the work I do.

Shannon Ragan
I was seeing in one of your newsletter editions that you were covering some of the influencers in the industry or people that are speaking at recent events I saw Sophia Santos, Jake Creps, Dutch OSINT Guy, I think Ritu Gill as well, and Rae Baker. Do you recommend or are you yourself, like, following these people for content, for tips, for training, and do you recommend that to other journalists to do?

Craig Silverman
Yeah, in my approach for reporting, one of the things that I talk about a lot or sort of teach and give in workshops is the idea of kind of monitoring, which is the straightforward idea of, like, I’m on a beat or I’m working on a story. I need to find all the relevant sources and people and get that sort of flowing to me in a way that I can consume it and structure it and use that for my work. And so it’s been kind of the same with just getting to know the OSINT world of trying to find people who are building interesting tools, giving interesting talks, sharing their knowledge. And that’s one of the things that definitely stands out to me, is how generous and open people are. It’s a wonderful community in that sense. And as much as I haven’t felt like I’m sort of embedded in it, people have been welcoming to me when I’ve met with them or talked with them. And so I do follow all the people you’ve mentioned. I build Twitter lists, I subscribe to tons of newsletters and try to interact with people and talk to them because there’s so much to learn from folks.

Craig Silverman
And definitely I advocate for journalists, sort of try to see this world a little bit and take from it what works. Some of the stuff isn’t applicable. We have to be very careful about working with hack and breach data, for example. We have different constraints, but then at the same time, we have the ability to, in some cases, force people to talk to us. I don’t know how many threat investigators end up talking to people who were at an Apt or what have you, right? And so there’s things we can do that they can’t, things they can do that we can’t. And if you’re able to put those things together, then it’s like a lot is possible. So I try to read a lot of it and then package it up so that other people who might be following me in the journalism world can also get exposed to it too.

Aubrey Byron
So can you talk a little bit about how you use these techniques in your reporting? You had a great piece earlier this year about a scammer who tricked Instagram into banning influencers, and you were actually able to identify someone associated with the account. How did you find him?

Craig Silverman
Yeah, so this was a guy who went by the name OBN, or a guy or a group. Still some things unclear about it. Right. This is the tricky elements of Attribution that I’m sure a lot of people can relate to. So this story actually started back, and I guess it was in 2022 when I started hearing from some people that, one, you could buy verification on Instagram because obviously lots of people want that badge. It conveys status, it legitimizes. Whatever business or influencing they might be doing can increase their income. So we started doing some reporting about sort of these tick mark for sale operators and sort of exposed a pretty big operation that Meta ended up taking some action against. But as we were doing that story, we kept hearing that a big player in this world was this OBN figure. And as we sort of learned more and more about it, we tried to figure out Bianca Portis, the other reporter, and I like, who is this person? And how is it that they can so brazenly be publicly advertising the services of getting people banned, getting people verified, reactivating accounts, and boasting about it completely publicly in a Telegram channel with lots of followers?

Craig Silverman
Right? So one part of it is, of course, the traditional reporting of human sources. We tried to find as many people who had been scammed and ripped off by him as possible. They’re typically motivated to tell you their story. Former, current business partners, anyone who would talk to us or anyone who had just been paying attention to him, because there was a whole community of these kind of banners and scammers. And as we spoke to people, we of course wanted to get any evidence of like, payments, anything, logs of chats with him, anything that could help us kind of get content to understand more about this person. Or what bank account were you told to send the money to, what email did you use to send the funds to? And as we were doing that and gathering those materials, we were just reading obsessively and scrolling back through this Telegram channel that they had and other sort of affiliated telegram channels. And as I think a lot of people can relate to, folks unintentionally share a lot of information that can be useful in an investigation. And sometimes it’s sort of casual things of making references to locations that could maybe start narrowing down where they are.

Craig Silverman
Or sometimes it’s really explicit things. Like, at one point in that channel, they shared a note from the Las Vegas Police Department with some redacted personal information on it saying, congratulations, you passed this first stage to be considered as a cadet. And it was shared in the OBN channel with OBN. Basically, I’m thinking about a career change. And then, like, the next day, the channel had a video of somebody in the parking lot of the LBPD. Pretty easy to geolocate that and just be like, okay, I’m going for my so. You know, it was a lot of that, just like reading through hundreds and hundreds of telegram posts, interviewing lots of people, getting any of the material and any indications of identity. I ended up writing up what was like a five page document of all of the material we had gathered, all the photos, all the people who’ve been scammed by him, who in some cases hired a private eye to try and tack this guy down. And we wrote like a five page sort of attribution document of here is everything that connects this guy to this person. Who turned out to be a young guy named Edwin in Las Vegas.

Craig Silverman
And one of the things we found, for example, was that somebody had sent a payment to an email address, and we could see that that email address aligned with the partially redacted email address that was in that Las Vegas Police Department letter they had shared in the Telegram channel. And so, yes, as we got to feeling more confident that this person, at the very least, is involved, I got on a plane and went to Las Vegas and ended up sitting on his couch in the small two bedroom apartment he shares with his mom and basically putting all of this stuff to him and listening to him deny. You know, it’s nice when the target of an investigation will actually sit and talk with you. That’s a really great thing.

Shannon Ragan
Well, to that point, I’m curious versus, like you were saying with traditional OSINT or CTI investigations, that you are never going to speak to these people, let alone purposefully reach out to them. How does that impact your research with the intersection of OSINT and journalism that you have to reach out to the subject of your investigation?

Craig Silverman
Well, look, I mean, one part of it is you have to make sure you’re doing a good job of archiving and capturing before you reach out to people. And that’s just right. Like a best practice in general, because it’s not even just that they might disappear because you reach out. They could disappear it at any time. This is the reality. So that element of being really disciplined about collecting and archiving and organizing your materials and your evidence is a part of that. Knowing you’re going to get to the point where obviously you have to put it to them. That’s just our responsibility as journalists. We have legal responsibilities, ethical responsibilities, and also, it’s a way better story when they talk to you. And you also have to be open to being wrong, right? And so to do an investigation where you can’t actually put the claims to someone and have them come back to you, there’s a certain amount of risk in that, and it’s inherent for some people, they can’t do that, and I get that, but for us, it’s like it’s required. And you have to keep an open mind. You can have your five page document of all the connections and know he’s probably going to deny it, but you have to also be open to, well, could he share something that actually changes your perspective on it?

Craig Silverman
And I remember Bianca and I constantly going back and forth where people would say, no, it’s this guy or It’s that guy, and we would have to sit there. We’d have to say, okay, so is this possible? What if we’re completely wrong? And that’s really important. So having a chance to do that and having them talk to you is, I think, really great. And it’s essential. At the very least, you’ve given them a chance to respond. It’s often called no surprises. Journalists. And you tell them everything that’s going to be in that story related to them, all the accusations. You give them a chance to respond. And you really do it in a way where you have to make sure your mind is not made up and you’re ready to listen to what they have to say.

Shannon Ragan
Is this the opposite of that gotcha journalism I’ve heard?

Craig Silverman
Well, the person who is seeing everything you’ve gathered feels like it’s gotcha journalism.

Shannon Ragan
I mean, okay, that’s fair.

Craig Silverman
That’s for sure. For them, it’s like yeah. And look, a lot of times people will just refuse. Like, there was somebody who he had been involved with and working with, and we had connections between them, and they had sort of said to me in a chat, it’s like, I’ve read your articles. All you do is expose people. Why would I talk to you?

Shannon Ragan
That’s adorable.

Craig Silverman
Solid question.

Aubrey Byron
Really?

Craig Silverman
Well, yeah, it’s like, fair. Yeah.

Aubrey Byron
I’m still so fascinated by the psychology of a scammer who wants to be a police cadet, to be honest.

Shannon Ragan
Of course he does.

Craig Silverman
Of course. It felt like a troll, right? It felt like they did the application because all it was was a really basic thing, proving like you’re a citizen and these kinds of things to take the test. And it felt like an epic troll by them to sort of be able to say that at the same time, this guy lives with his mom. And so I could see him being like, you need to get a good job and get a real career going here, and him applying for it to make her happy.

Shannon Ragan
Everybody loves their mom.

Aubrey Byron
Yeah. I did immediately kind of echo in my head the Idaho murder or the person, the defendant who was studying criminology, too.

Shannon Ragan
Yeah.

Craig Silverman
Right.

Shannon Ragan
Yeah.

Craig Silverman
Get that insider knowledge, right?

Aubrey Byron
Yeah. So a lot of your reporting investigates the crossroads between social media platforms and disinformation. Are you seeing any wider trends as far as that goes right now?

Craig Silverman
Well, the unfortunate thing, having been looking at this now for more than a decade, is it doesn’t feel like it’s getting better in a lot of ways. If we just look in the past year or two, a lot of the big digital platforms had really scaled up what they called integrity or trust and safety teams, people responsible for kind of doing the monitoring and rolling out tools and policies and enforcement and that kind of, you know, because of sort of financial challenges. And then also because I think of the precedent that Elon set when he acquired Twitter and he basically just laid off and got rid of tons of people on that team. A lot of the platforms have actually been firing and have fewer numbers of those people. And the thing that’s really kind of frightening about that is 2024 has an insane amount of elections around the world. Like, forget the US. I mean, we’re talking about like Indonesia, Mexico, we have an election in Taiwan coming up on and on and on around the world. And these platforms are obviously really popular and really integrated into the election and campaigning and information ecosystem all around the world.

Craig Silverman
And it may be Facebook’s really big here. WhatsApp is really big there? It’s TikTok here or these kinds of things, but that’s a big trend, is unfortunately, they have been laying people off in these areas. And this is at the same time, of course, that the easy and widespread use of AI potentially sort of I don’t think it’s going to be dramatically different, but it makes certain things easier. It again lowers the barrier to entry for manipulation and not having people in place ready for that and not building internal tooling for that. I think I’m pretty worried about next year. And so certainly what we’re seeing now with Ukraine, Russia and Israel Hamas, there’s been a lot of claims know that’s not real, that’s AI in cases where they are real photos or the seeding of AI generated photos or know to make a sort of propagandistic point. So we’re definitely seeing that. And the volume a lot of the fact checkers that I know who are really focused on the Israel Hamas stuff, they just say the volume is outrageous of what they’re seeing of false, misleading claims. And the dynamic is really that a lot of stuff is originating on Telegram, and then it’s sort of getting a larger profile on, you know, the dynamics of Twitter now is if you have a verified account and you’re getting huge engagement through other verified accounts, you can literally make money off of it.

Craig Silverman
And because they’re not enforcing trust and safety stuff like before, you’re probably not at huge risk of losing money. If you do get a community note on your post, that will negate it from earning money. But I think the dynamics have shown that people who are consistently being misleading or sensational are winning out and earning some money on Twitter. So those are some of the dynamics. And the emergence of Telegram, I think, is just a really big thing in the last few years because of Ukraine Russia war. That’s the place that a lot of the pro Russia folks, but also the Ukrainian folks, were putting footage. So it’s been big for OSINT and big for distribution of lies as well. And Israel Hamas, I mean, Hamas was really maintaining a lot of his channels on Telegram again, because of its lack of moderation. So those are some of the things that come to mind and that sort of are worrying me to a great extent, which is another reason why we’ve got to get these skills in more newsrooms, because newsrooms are often targeted. They want us to amplify stuff that’s not true because it gives it that aura of even more credibility, or it helps hurt the credibility of media when you show that they fell for it, which then makes people turn elsewhere for information.

Shannon Ragan
Yeah, I think I might know the answer to this, but do you feel that news media is prepared at an organizational level or even just like at an individual journalist level? Like, people are just becoming more conscious of what I’m consuming, might be AI generated, might be more manipulated than I’m used to seeing before, things like that.

Craig Silverman
I do think that there’s an awareness of that. And I think the awareness is not only in newsrooms, but for the public, but it’s not necessarily manifesting in a concrete, I’m ready to deal with this and here’s what I’m going to do. It’s like there’s a certain amount of helplessness and worry and that’s sort of one of the worst scenarios is to have a lot of people feeling like, I know there could be AI stuff anywhere. I know there could be lies and falsehoods anywhere, and I don’t know what to do about that. And that leads people to detaching. It leads them to not understand where to apply their trust. And when you start losing trust in society, that takes away some of the glue that is really important for a lot of things and it becomes a very profound element. And so people then try to reapply it elsewhere and they look for sort of more, in some ways, kind of tribal things to apply their trust to. Well, I’m just going to stick to the things that I know and that just these people and what I relate to and that kind of thing.

Craig Silverman
And it kind of shrinks their world to just the immediate things around them. So we have a lot of training work to do in newsrooms around this. Again, just like basic visual verification and geolocation skills would go a long way for newsrooms when it comes to AI stuff. So much of it obviously is visual. And if it is an AI generated photo, it’s going to lack some details of contextual verification of like, well, can I talk to the people who are at this event? Can I find the person who shot this photo in addition to reverse image search coming up empty and those things? So yeah, I have concerns about the lack of preparation and just the kind of despair and unsure and uncertainty that people have about what should I be trusting and believing? Because you can’t just say, I’m going to trust journalists all the time. We get things wrong. You need to figure out for yourself how to evaluate information. And that’s a responsibility that everybody has in a very chaotic environment now.

Aubrey Byron
Yeah, it’s such a great point too, to point out that this isn’t unique to the, you know, even Western countries. We talked a little bit last year with Nina Lamparsky of AFP who runs one of the fact checking teams she was talking about even just like small local elections in these little countries in Africa just flooded with, you know, trying to parse through that as.

Craig Silverman
It’S, it’s definitely a global phenomenon. I mean, things are connected and also as anybody can relate to the bad actors, the threat actors, they learn from each other and they see what works here and they see what works there and they are unencumbered by ethics and it’s cheap and easy to get this stuff going. And in some cases it’s a business model. There are places that describe themselves as a marketing or PR firm that are basically just kind of disinformation for hire, that’s become now an inseparable part of the political process. In the Philippines, everybody hires their kind of black hat PR firms and some of them are way worse than others, but everybody is trying to mobilize their element. And so you get this kind of competitive nature where it’s just sort of a race to the bottom and it’s happening all over.

Aubrey Byron
We talked a little bit about how researchers sometimes spend their wheels a little bit on the hunt for the newest, best tool and they can be over reliant on it, but it’s still helpful to share resources like you two in your newsletter. Are there Ozen tools that you think journalists should know about or even vice versa? Journalism tools and techniques that you think researchers should know about?

Craig Silverman
Yeah, I think there’s definitely some interplay between the two. Look, I mean, everybody should know about the intel techniques tools lists, right? Like this is foundational stuff that have returned to us, which is great. And actually when I do workshops for journalists, I don’t show that stuff until the very end because it’s like, well why did you show me this and that? You could have just directed me to this website. It’s like, yeah, but you have to understand what these services are that you’re running stuff through. And the same thing for connecting websites together through analytics codes or advertising codes. You got to know how to go and find these in a website because if you’re just getting the report about them from built with or Dnslytics, you don’t know if it’s still on the site, you don’t know how to go confirm that for yourself. In terms of tools from journalism, one that comes to mind is a tool that was built by a news organization called the Markup. They do amazing data driven reporting. They created a tool called Blacklight. And Blacklight is basically a website scanning tool and it will tell you all of the different ad trackers that are on that site.

Craig Silverman
So who are the potential ad partners or analytics tools that they’re using? It will also tell you if that website has keystroke capture software built in or if it has other potentially privacy invasive stuff in it. And this is all just like an easy report. You drop the. URL in and it’s going to give you that report. And I know they’re working on a new upgraded version of it. But as it is right now, Blacklight is a great simple web scanning tool for you to kind of get a sense of the sort of data collection, analytics, and potentially privacy invasive stuff on a website. And that’s a tool built by a news organization. My organization Propublica has a tool that can help you search through the filings of nonprofits in the United States. We collect and organize and make very searchable these IRS filings from nonprofits in the United States. And so that’s a tool that investigators should be aware of as well, where you’re taking government documents that are not being made available in really searchable and easy ways. And we built this database to do that. In terms of OSINT tools that I tell journalists about, when it comes to website stuff, I am showing things like built with and Dnslytics we are talking about who know domain tools is often very kind and works with or donates things to newsrooms to use their tools.

Craig Silverman
And so those are things that come up. And lately I’ve been showing a lot of people the tools like Epios and cashrick clues and OSINT industries where you can pop in email addresses, usernames phone numbers just to help you sort of get a sense of kind of the use of that and the prevalence of it. So, I mean, I think there’s a lot there’s new stuff coming out all the time, but like every good OSINT investigator I’ve ever talked to or read stuff from, I mean, it starts with your mindset and how good you are and how persistent you are at trying to figure out and solve problems. There’s usually multiple ways to find something and it’s really exciting when you can find a path and somebody’s got another one and you can factor sort of those approaches in and adapt those over. You know, as people say that the tools come and go, but the kind of mindset and the approach is forever. And that’s something I think a lot of journalists can relate to.

Aubrey Byron
Yeah, you mentioned training. I know you are partnering with Global Investigative Journalism Network on a training course. Do you want to talk a little about that?

Craig Silverman
Yeah, this is a really exciting thing. So the Global Investigative Journalism Network is a nonprofit that works with investigative outlets all around the world. It’s very global and they publish guides all the time. And we have actually just published recently a free online guide to investigating digital threats, which is targeted at journalists. There’s also a new guide they published about investigating war crimes. So those are the kinds of things they do. But years ago they were trying to get somebody to write a sort of guide about digital threats and they realized, oh, there weren’t many journalists in this global network who actually could do that. And were doing it. And so they managed to get a grant. And this year and next year, we’re training about 50 journalists from around the world in two cohorts per year to investigate disinformation, trolling Internet infrastructure, and sort of fundamentals of digital investigations around social media, websites, ads, finding people, searching companies, all that kind of stuff. And so we just actually kicked off this week. This is week one of the six week cohort, the second one this year with some amazing, impressive journalists from all around the world.

Craig Silverman
And the goal is just have more people trained to do this work and then take it back to their newsrooms, take it back to their countries and develop and publish great investigations. And the timing is good, given all of these elections coming up. So we’re hoping to really increase the quality of the reporting in these areas, not just in a couple of countries, but in lots of places around the world.

Shannon Ragan
Yeah, that’s a great initiative. My last question has absolutely nothing to do with that. For that matter, I saw a tweet by you from, like, already a month ago about giving the wager by David Grant to your child. And I asked because Aubrey and I recently inhaled this book. Did you read it? And what did you think?

Craig Silverman
I read the wager. I’m a grandstand, great writer. I’m a sucker for a great nonfiction book. I read so little fiction. It’s, I think, actually a problem in my reading diet because I’m just so in this nonfiction world all the time. But David Grant is definitely one of my favorites. I’ve read many of his books, really enjoyed The Wager. And then, yeah, my eldest kid, whose age I will not share for good offset reasons, no names, no ages, but had sort of needed a book to read. And he’s getting a bit older. And I was like, I think this book, it’s got shipwreck, it’s got pirates, this could work. Right? And so, yeah, I suggested to him, gave it to him, he really liked it. And then he actually read a book that I had written many years ago about a teenage hacker after that for school. And I was like, So which one did you like better? And he’s like, look, your book was good, but you’re notate Grant.

Shannon Ragan
You kind of set yourself up for.

Craig Silverman
I really did. No way I was going to win that. Right, right.

Shannon Ragan
Well, I think we might pivot this show to a grandstand fan club.

Aubrey Byron
You think he’s using investigative techniques? Should he come on the show?

Craig Silverman
I would love to hear him talk about or I would love to sort of sit down with him because, I mean, his documentary research is obviously amazing. Like, in that book, it was like digging into archives. But, yeah, I think he’s the kind of thing where we might be surprised of his Google skills or things like that, because I bet he’s sitting and spending a lot of time trying to find things.

Aubrey Byron
Yeah, well, open call in case he’s a fan.

Shannon Ragan
We could spin that.

Craig Silverman
Yeah.

Shannon Ragan
David, we’d love to have you. Well, Craig, thank you so much for being on the show. This was such a great chat. And thank you to all the audience that were listening. You can learn more about where to find Craig and his work and books and all of the resources that we talked about on the show in our show notes. You can also view transcripts and other episode info in our website authentic8.com/needlestack. That’s authentic with the number eight .com slash needlestack. And be sure to let us know your thoughts on X, formerly Twitter or Bluesky @needlestackpod and like and subscribe wherever you are listening today. We’ll see you next time.