Foraging Online Social Networks

A concise and practical introduction is given on Online Social Networks (OSN) and their application in law enforcement, including a brief survey of related work. Subsequently, a tool is introduced that can be used to search OSN in order to generate user profiles. Both its architecture and processing pipeline are described. This tool is meant as a flexible framework that supports manual foraging (and not replaces it). As such, we aim to bridge science's state-of-the-art and current security officer's practice. This article ends with a brief discussion on privacy and ethical issues and future work.