REVIEW: Cynthia Hetherington — OSINT: The Authoritative Guide to Due Diligence (BOOK)
“Due diligence is a specialized legal, accounting, and auditing term, but for intelligence professionals and for the purposes of this book, due diligence is the thorough research of a topic utilizing the tools available and the resources that are accessible. In these pages, I focus on business due diligence because business is the core of everything. A business is merely an organization of individuals. You can call it organized crime, a gang, or an affiliate group, but the methods are always the same. Throughout this text, I will give examples of how this is true.
So, this book is for you if you’re a newbie looking to protect personal interests, a seasoned business due diligence analyst who wants to catch up on the new tools, or a law enforcement or military professional who wants to transition into a new career on my side of the fence,” writes Cynthia Hetherington, MLS, MSM, CFE, CII, OSC in the third edition of her book The Authoritative Guide to Due Diligence: Essential Resources for Critical Business Intelligence. While not perhaps as emotionally engaging as some players in the business and leadership advice field, sacrificing some degree of facts communication for heft, Hetherington is unrelentingly thorough. She writes with the kind of cool, steely confidence of someone entirely relaxed and knowledgeable in their field. The result is something that never wavers in terms of communicative quality with respect to said facts. You’re presented a full, three hundred-and-sixty-degree panorama of the book’s core conceptual qualities.
It’s fitting because the methodology of Hetherington’s that she promotes in the book remains fail-safe. In a passage at the beginning of the book titled Everything has changed. Nothing has changed, Hetherington states: “Our approach has not changed. Our approach is sound and should always stay the same. What’s changed is the amount of data out there. Due diligence is a volume game now. Data is the single drop of water in an ocean of information that keeps expanding. Our job is not just to find that drop of water, but to find it twice — that’s how an analyst substantiates or negates a claim.
AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/Osint-Authoritative-Guide-Due-Diligence/dp/1960299425
Yet an analyst’s ability to capture that data is getting harder and harder. Our skill sets and our tools have to keep improving so that we can keep up. I teach thousands of people a year how to stay ahead of that curve. While this book is primarily meant for the OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence) due diligence professional, my mission is broader. I want to make this planet a safer place. In order to achieve that, I’m desperately passionate about making sure that everybody — from seasoned professionals to rank amateurs — has an access point to online OSINT data and a method to process that data so that they can improve their world by making smart choices. I want to protect people from being led down a road of disinformation, misinformation, or just patent lies.”
By not only promoting what she has to offer, but consistently able to take the case, Hetherington doesn’t just strike the target audience as reliable, she’s a leader in the field. That is to be seriously commended.
Colin Jordan
