With just a few keystrokes, Hetherington tracked down a government employee who has access to sensitive intelligence information and then — using social networking sites he frequented, such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter — found his telephone number, home address and pictures of his newborn twins.
Then she mused on the hypothetical of how she might kidnap his children and exchange them for access to the critical database.
The presentation on Friday was the capstone of a three-day meeting of the International Association for Asset Recovery on Miami Beach.
While much of the conference focused on the nuts and bolts of working with financial companies and national and foreign courts to track down hidden and illicit assets, it also veered into the burgeoning field of social-network mining.
Hetherington, who was trained as a librarian and is now using those skills as a private investigator, asked a reporter not to name the man whom she raked over the digital coals during her presentation before some 300 people.
But we can say he works at a government agency that starts with a C, ends with an A and may have an I in the middle.
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