From the book, What You Don't Know... Your Guide to Achieving "Knowledge Advantage" in the Information Age!"Valuable Open Source information is thrown away every day, waiting to be collected by the thoughtful researcher. Dubbed “dumpster diving,” or “trash picking” a wastebasket becomes a friend to researchers and a foe of anyone you are collecting on...
How useful dumpster diving is can be readily seen by the fact that a highly-placed US intelligence official was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for working with Moscow operatives. He had thoughtlessly thrown away key clues to his betrayal, not thinking they would end up on a prosecutor’s desk. Expecting anything to be buried forever in a trash heap can be a major mistake...
In the United States the Supreme Court has said that, as a general rule, things left in trash cans curbside are considered “abandoned” and are there for the taking."
Related: Confidential Paperwork Security
