O
OSINT
Guest
My name is John E. Putman II, I'm 46 and located in AZ. Here is the "quick" and dirty.
I come from a long line of military servers on my Mother's side, and it had been my intention to join after college. In my freshman year I was hit head-on by a van (no seatbelt) and blew my legs and right hip apart and ended up being ejected from the vehicle. Despite nearly a full recovery a couple of years later, I was unable to enlist due to the severity of the injury's sustained (I tried twice, once in my 20's with the Army then again in my 30's with the AZ National Guard).
My original goal was to follow in my Uncle Bud's footsteps and work in Army Intelligence (he was Army for certain, Intelligence maybe - read on). With that no longer on the table I moved into financial research, distributive computing, large data-sets and genetic programming. As the internet began to mature I also found myself involved in OSINT on the corporate & competitive intelligence side of things.
Those skill sets eventually led to a very brief consulting project with a contractor inside the NSA back in 2003. That's as close as I ever got to actually doing something meaningful for our country.
I have a couple of reasons for joining, and I greatly appreciate the ability to do so: First I want to keep pushing my skill set on the Open Source Intelligence side of things as doing so in the past has helped me keep my company competitive in an ever changing market. Secondly and most importantly, someday I want to sit down and try to uncover what my uncle really did. To the family he was a complete enigma - after he left the army no one ever knew what he did for a living. The only "tel" he ever gave us was calling his brothers bluff.
Some of the older members here may remember the MX Missile program. It was a hotly contested program and never approved by Congress, so they were never built (assembled). The parts for the program however were under full production on the assumption it would pass. Bud's brother (my other uncle) worked for a large government contractor on the program as a QC inspector. The factory of course was "Top Secret" access only.
Bud used to joke with his brother that he was going to walk into the factory some day and bring him lunch. "J" would laugh and say good luck with that. You can probably figure out the balance. One day Bud cruised into the guts of the factory and brought his brother lunch. To this day the family still has no idea what he did for a living, but after he passed we found pictures of him with every standing President from the 70's up to Clinton... He obviously was somebody, we just don't know who.
Hopefully by rubbing elbows with some of you I can continue to improve my own knowledge base and also get some direction on how to - as much as possible - uncover the mystery of Uncle Bud. Ancillary to all of this is, I'm also getting involved in fitness. I've lost over 60 pounds in the last two years and I always have an eye on the military side of that as I often find it the most sensible/proven approaches. I'm all about efficiency when it comes to working out: max results for effort expended.
Thanks. - JP
I come from a long line of military servers on my Mother's side, and it had been my intention to join after college. In my freshman year I was hit head-on by a van (no seatbelt) and blew my legs and right hip apart and ended up being ejected from the vehicle. Despite nearly a full recovery a couple of years later, I was unable to enlist due to the severity of the injury's sustained (I tried twice, once in my 20's with the Army then again in my 30's with the AZ National Guard).
My original goal was to follow in my Uncle Bud's footsteps and work in Army Intelligence (he was Army for certain, Intelligence maybe - read on). With that no longer on the table I moved into financial research, distributive computing, large data-sets and genetic programming. As the internet began to mature I also found myself involved in OSINT on the corporate & competitive intelligence side of things.
Those skill sets eventually led to a very brief consulting project with a contractor inside the NSA back in 2003. That's as close as I ever got to actually doing something meaningful for our country.
I have a couple of reasons for joining, and I greatly appreciate the ability to do so: First I want to keep pushing my skill set on the Open Source Intelligence side of things as doing so in the past has helped me keep my company competitive in an ever changing market. Secondly and most importantly, someday I want to sit down and try to uncover what my uncle really did. To the family he was a complete enigma - after he left the army no one ever knew what he did for a living. The only "tel" he ever gave us was calling his brothers bluff.
Some of the older members here may remember the MX Missile program. It was a hotly contested program and never approved by Congress, so they were never built (assembled). The parts for the program however were under full production on the assumption it would pass. Bud's brother (my other uncle) worked for a large government contractor on the program as a QC inspector. The factory of course was "Top Secret" access only.
Bud used to joke with his brother that he was going to walk into the factory some day and bring him lunch. "J" would laugh and say good luck with that. You can probably figure out the balance. One day Bud cruised into the guts of the factory and brought his brother lunch. To this day the family still has no idea what he did for a living, but after he passed we found pictures of him with every standing President from the 70's up to Clinton... He obviously was somebody, we just don't know who.
Hopefully by rubbing elbows with some of you I can continue to improve my own knowledge base and also get some direction on how to - as much as possible - uncover the mystery of Uncle Bud. Ancillary to all of this is, I'm also getting involved in fitness. I've lost over 60 pounds in the last two years and I always have an eye on the military side of that as I often find it the most sensible/proven approaches. I'm all about efficiency when it comes to working out: max results for effort expended.
Thanks. - JP
Uh oh...
