Four Screen Capture Tools for Private Investigators

Screen capture tools for saving social media pages and web pages is a topic that comes up frequently for private investigators. There are tons of tools out there, ranging from the simple snipping tools to complex screen capture software that “captures” metadata, timestamps and links.

There are some companies that offer really expensive tools for collecting evidence on a mass enterprise scale, like PageFreezer, X1 Social Discovery and the like. These services can cost thousands of dollars and are designed for big-data collection.

While those are amazing tools for massive cases, that’s not what most of us small investigation shops do.

More often than not, my typical use case would be when I need to:

1. Screen capture something to add into a report;
2. Save an entire web page to include as an attachment to a report or collecting “evidence” (I am using that term pretty loosely here); or
3. Capture some critical piece of information that may disappear from the Interwebs (that’s a technical term).

While most of the work that I do as a private investigator does not end up in court, I constantly have an eye toward how the information is collected in case it ever does end up in court.

So, for example, if I am conducting a sensitive interview, I might want to record the interview (with permission depending on the state you are in), have a second witness with me to validate the conversation or draft a summary of the interview immediately after, and have the person sign an affidavit or declaration. That way, in case the person misremembers something or changes his or her mind, I’ve got some good backup.

Similarly, if I ever need to authenticate any of our background investigation research, I can refer to the court document, news article or corporate filings where we found the information. If needed, I can get certified copies of court documents of government filings to present in court.

More frequently, information for the vast majority of our casework is being collected via the Internet, especially social media. Since that type of information can be deleted or altered at any moment, simply including a link to a web page in our report may not be enough, since by the time it comes up, it may not be there anymore.

The more sensitive the case, the more cautious you need to be.

Warning

Before I get into the meat of this post, I am not a legal expert and don’t pretend to be. If you are doing some serious evidence collection with a lot at stake, you should first consult an expert and/or an attorney.

Don’t rely on what I tell you.

That being said, after years of collecting information, this is the process that I typically go through.

Screen Capture for Quick, Everyday Use

Built-in screenshot applications on Mac and the snipping tool on Windows computers are good if you need to capture something quickly to share. They can easily be stored on your computer and dropped into an email or report, and offer a great visual.

I also use the built-in features of Google Chrome’s “Save as a PDF” to capture an entire web page. These are typically pieces of information that are particularly interesting that I may want to refer to. What I like about this form of data collection over simply just taking a screenshot is that the text is searchable, so I can recall the information by simply searching my computer without much of a problem.

In terms of preserving evidence, neither of these ways is particularly good. Screenshots are just photos and can be easily altered; the same goes for PDFs. It doesn’t take much to alter those, either. 

I’ve got some pretty rudimentary Photoshop skills from 20+ years ago, but I am pretty sure I can alter a screenshot to make it look legit enough that nobody would be able to tell it is a fake.

Not that I would ever do that.

So, even if the initial manner in which you preserve the evidence isn’t the best, it might be important to capture something quickly, because it might be taken down.

Screen Capture for Good-Looking Screenshots, with Extra Protection

As described above, most web browsers give you the option to save as a PDF, which includes the URL and date/time of capture; most of these built-in features give you a jumbled-looking, ugly PDF.

There are several Firefox and Chrome add-ons that make the page look a lot prettier. Fireshot and GoFullPage are two of the most popular (although as of the date of this post, Fireshot for Chrome is not working). I strongly recommend the paid versions of these; they have features like adding a date and full URL.

There are a number of built-in features to make screenshots pretty by using “smart” PDF page splitting, and include the URL and timestamp on the page.

While this is similar to saving a page to a PDF, it makes it look so much better. It will look exactly like the web page as you see it, so it’s familiar to everyone. What you see is what you get; WYSIWYG for you nerds out there.

(Note: GoFullPage looks like they have a “legal” version in the works for legal professionals that seems interesting.)

So, if you need a pain-free way of collecting a web page exactly as you see it, to attach to a report or court filing, this may be a good choice.

Secure Collection

For cases that I think may end up in court or involve scenarios in which authenticity may be challenged, I turn to Hunchly.

This is where things start getting nerdy. But in short, if you need to collect evidence that may be ultimately challenged and attacked in court or elsewhere, you need to start thinking about collecting evidence to be preserved accurately and minimizing the risk of tampering.

For this, I use Hunchly, a lightweight Chrome extension that captures web pages in MHTML format, and that includes a timestamp and maintains links and metadata. What Hunchly captures is automatically timestamped, hashed and stored on your computer hard drive. So, while you are scrolling around the Internet, Hunchly is working in the background saving everything that you are doing in a secure way.

What’s great about this is that you can always go back and search Hunchly for something that you captured, meaning you don’t have to worry about recalling the exact web page of some little nugget of information that you found weeks ago.

All of the data is stored on your computer, where it can be saved for eternity.

I don’t use this in every case I work, but there are cases in which I will. In other cases, I might save a few web pages into Hunchly if they are important. This way, I’ve always got a record of them, in case it ever comes up again. 

Hunchly is not perfect. It doesn’t do a great job with scrolling web pages, like a Facebook or Twitter timeline. It also doesn’t always produce the prettiest looking pages that, for example, I can attach to a court filing.

So what do I typically do?

For sensitive cases, I will capture them through Hunchly; then, to preserve them and capture them, I will use GoFullPage to include in a report or affidavit. This way, I have the secured collection of Hunchly, with the lovely PDF that GoFullPage will produce.

(I spoke to Justin Seitz, founder of Hunchly, and he says that Version 3.0 of Hunchly is going to handle some things much better.)

Hunchly costs $130 per year and it is worth every penny for the peace of mind it affords.

For Secure, Court-Ready Critical Web Pages

The last recommendation is Page Vault. I have been using this company’s product for several years. What I like about Page Vault is that it is designed specifically for legal professionals, so they are speaking the same language as the attorneys I work with.

The captures from Page Vault look great and include all the metadata and secure hashing. But what separates this from other services I mentioned is that it keeps investigators out of the chain of custody of evidence and outsources the technical issues to an outside firm. So if there is a question about the authenticity of the documents, professionals at Page Vault can issue an affidavit about the screen capture process, and Page Vault can serve as an expert witness to describe the technology and storage process behind it.

I am pretty good at some things, but explaining the technology behind the capture process and technical jargon is not one of them.

So, my use case for this would be a one-off situation in which there were a few critical web pages that needed to be authenticated and saved and that may come into question down the road.

Page Vault starts at $100 per page capture, so it can get pricey depending on what you are doing.

Bonus Tools

One thing to consider when archiving web pages is saving the data to Archive.org, Archive.today or another third-party archiving site. As most of you know, Archive.org is the largest repository of historical web pages on the planet. It’s an incredible resource for so many things.

One thing you may not know, though, is that both Archive.org and Archive.today have ways that you can submit a URL to be archived onto their site. I use the Chrome extensions (Archive.org Chrome extension; Archive.today Chrome extension), where you can archive a specific page while you are on it.

I like this method because it’s permanently saved through a third party whose credibility is widely known. Having said that, you have to be careful what you are saving for these services, but you get the point.

Thanks to Steve Mason for starting up this conversation.