One effective way to develop an investigative protocol and practice your skills is to investigate a familiar topic or person. In this assignment, you are going to do just that-collect as much online information as you can about yourself. Look for identifying information, addresses, e-mail addresses, social network sites, pictures posted online, etc.

This exercise allows you to practice your investigative techniques on a familiar subject. Also, knowing how much information about you is available online is important to anyone working in law enforcement and criminal justice fields. Knowing "what's out there" allows you to take whatever steps you think might be necessary to limit or remove information you may want to keep private.

The assignment then, is to use whatever tools, techniques, and searches that are appropriate to search for and collect information about yourself.

While you are doing that, think about how you would collect and preserve that information if you were going to use it in an investigation.

Then, describe your efforts and results in your initial post. In that post,

• Explain the process and steps you used in your investigation and answer these questions:
  • What was your starting point?
  • What resources did you did use?
  • How did you search for information?
  • How would you have collected the results if you knew they would go into a report and possibly be used as evidence in a trial?
  • If you did not want the subject of the investigation to learn that you are investigating her or him, what would you have done to prevent her or him from identifying you?