Algorithm & Clues with Blue Highway’s Ace Data Detective, Malcolm Taylor

Posting a picture of your dinner. Sharing your workouts with your trainer. That box you clicked because you needed that app that one time. The ways in which our data is bartered, sold and commandeered has ensured that a lot of us are much easier to keep tabs on than we might like to think. This is especially true if Blue Highway’s head of Investigations, Risk and Threat Assessment, Malcolm Taylor, is involved.

Taylor has spent the last three decades serving as a top-tier security and intelligence expert in the UK. Taylor’s talents, skillset and breadth of experience are singular. In government, Taylor worked in complex Counterterrorism, Serious Crime and Geo-Political analysis and operations, serving in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. As a leader, he’s focused on sensitive security, information analysis and exploitation.

“If we wanted to know about a person, we would build what we called a pattern of life,” says Taylor. “We learn where they live, who their friends are, what their hobbies are, how they spend their money, what they think about when they go to church – all those things.”

It’s not dissimilar to the way social media platforms like TikTok operate. They build a map of your interests, track your movements, and can pretty easily and accurately predict where you’ll want to go next. All of this is done using public, perfectly accessible information. For Taylor, it’s just about knowing how to extract the pertinent information from the deluge of data.

“I would describe the internet as your digital tattoo,” says Taylor. “You can cover it up, you can obscure it, you can make it hard to find but you can't ever really get rid of it.”

At Blue Highway Advisory – a unique boutique specializing in senior-level strategic counsel for high-stakes litigation, crisis and tier one media plans – Taylor uses his vast experience to innovate creative solutions for clients. Blue Highway works closely with lawyers, artists, non-profits, educational institutions, policy makers or anyone looking for data that should rightfully be theirs to obtain. If there’s a needle in that haystack, Taylor will find it. He has spent the last 30 years refining tools to do precisely that.

Lawdragon: What drew you to this line of work?

Malcolm Taylor: I always wanted to work in the public sector, but I wasn't really sure what that meant. I was young and impressionable, and I applied for a generalist role with the British Civil Service. As a part of that application, I interviewed a few times, and I was actually talking to one of the intelligence agencies without really knowing it. They then offered me a role. I started in 1997 and had a couple of interesting jobs, counter-proliferation stuff that came back around to the Iraq war and the WMD question. Then 9/11 happened and I watched that from one of the most secret buildings in Britain, which was a strange experience. I remember having the feeling that my life's inevitably going to change.

LD: Good instinct. The whole world changed that day.

MT: It did, and everybody felt that. In my position, we all felt that our jobs were going to change pretty rapidly. And they did, overnight. Almost the entire UK government machine began to restructure around terrorism. Since then, most of my work in government was about counterterrorism.

The laws in the UK were slower to change than in the U.S., I think partly because we couldn't declare a war on terror because we’re not big enough, we're not rich enough, we're not the U.S. But things really did change – the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the Patriot Act, Operation Enduring Freedom, which was the codename for part of the War on Terror. My job changed overnight, and the wider culture changed. Everybody was focused on the mission, and the mission was terrorism.

I would describe the internet as your digital tattoo. You can cover it up, you can obscure it, you can make it hard to find but you can't ever really get rid of it.

LD: What made you move into private practice?

MT: My last proper government job was in Afghanistan. I was there for 18 months, through the election when Karzai gave up the presidency, through the UK troop drawdown – a real historic time. I left at the start of 2016. I was packed up, ready to come home, and the office rang me up and asked if I wanted to go overseas again to another war zone. My heart said yes, but my head said no. I'd been there, I'd been in Iraq, I'd been in Pakistan, and I just couldn't do it anymore. I'd had enough. Too much war, far too much death, too much living away from home.

Back in London I worked in private intelligence and cyber security. Then, in 2019, my wife and I decided to have a family and we moved out of London. We now live in the countryside and we’ve got two kids. So I got a job in Leeds, to be nearer to home, doing trust and safety for social media. I ran a team of intelligence analysts who work with big social media platforms to look at terrorism and extremism, but also child sex abuse, suicide and self-harm – all the grim things that you can think of. I did that for four years and I left in April this year to start working with Ian [McCaleb] at Blue Highway.

LD: Tell us about your work with Blue Highway.

MT: My job in cyber security was basically to translate the whole cyber risk thing for senior executives and decision makers who've got a budget, and are a bit scared but they want to understand. So I spent a lot of time out in London doing presentations and explaining cyber risk. I did a talk at a London college and Ian was the next speaker. We've got a lot in common – the background in intelligence, journalism and security – and we became friends. When he started Blue Highway, I joked with him that if I ever left corporate life, I'd go and work with him. I didn't really think I ever would do either of those things, but here we are!

My Blue Highway role revolves around getting ahold of information and presenting it. Ian's really good at presenting because he's a beautiful writer and he comes from a journalism background. At Blue Highway we distill a clear picture from all the information – and that really is about the internet. It's obviously the biggest data source in history and it gets bigger every day. All the world is online somewhere. It's hard to have secrets these days.

The internet and technology can be this treasure trove if you’re able to extract information and present it properly. That's what I do on behalf of Blue Highway and clients. We all should think of the internet as: If you put something out there, it's there forever. You can't get rid of it. There's deletion, but you can always get it back. It is important people understand that. fLD: Can you give us an example?

MT: In a recent matter, we were supporting a divorce settlement, working for a woman who was married to a very rich man and they split up. She alleged that was because of an affair he was having. He was denying that and refusing her a settlement and said she had to prove the timeline of the affair. So we did that. We found pictures that were on social media, messages he had sent. As that case went on, one day you'd find a picture and save it and the next day the picture would be gone – and that's because he was paying people to manipulate the history in real time. He had paid somebody to delete these things, which is why he was so confident, but you can't really do that, it's just too difficult. In the end he gave up and she got her settlement and he had to pay. That was nice.

LD: Can you give us the layman’s understanding of how you find deleted posts online?

MT: There are normally records, you can often get back to old versions of the same picture. You delete a photograph and all you really delete is the frontend image of that. So if you're reasonably clever, you can find it. I would describe the internet as your digital tattoo. You can cover it up, you can obscure it, you can make it hard to find but you can't ever really get rid of it. Social media is a huge treasure trove for people in this line of work. Users are typically very unsophisticated. Right out of the box, you get an app, you switch on, you log in, you get an account and there's no privacy on it. You have to apply the privacy itself – and most people don't do that. So you can very easily build a whole profile of people's lives.

If you're representing somebody in a case, invest in having a good picture of what's out there on the internet about them. It’s crucial background understanding because the other side is going to do that, and you don't want to be surprised.

Another example was a senior public-facing person, a Black man, who was facing abuse online from people like the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters. He was getting death threats and he wanted to know how exposed he really was. He was worried that this horrible online nastiness would become real in-person violence. What might these people be able to find out about him? So we did a digital report using social media and some exercise websites he used. We could see that on a Saturday morning every week he was going running and he went on one of three routes. So we write him a report that says next Saturday, at this time, you are likely to be at this place and if we want to find you – it's dead easy. We've got a one in three chance as you take three routes. That means if we do three weekends, we'll find you and if we want to do you harm, we can. Additionally, we discovered that his kids were posting on their social media, pictures, plans, whereabouts. So, it's grim, but if you want to kidnap this person, it's easy.

After our report, he changed his approach to using the internet. It can be tricky for a public person who needs to be seen, to have a public profile, but you must be careful, and you need to assess the risk of being seen. He needed to lock down social media accounts, lock down his running routes, and change his routines. Build separation between his pubic profile and his private life.

LD: Can you recount a time when Blue Highway impacted the discovery process in a lawsuit?

MT: We did some work around litigation support and discovery where there was a belief that one side was not being comprehensive in what they were releasing. The lawyer on the other side believed that she wasn't getting full discovery. We provided the full scope for her so that she could be confident in her approach to the problem. We showed that there were in fact other, additional conversations that were germane to the case, and she read them. She took that information forward and made the case that disclosure wasn't complete – and she was successful. They reached a settlement soon after that because the other side were beginning to worry that they were going to lose. And this was all publicly available information. It's quite hard to find, but it’s public information. The real skill is knowing where and how to look for it.

LD: How are you making use of AI, if at all?

MT: We are, and we aren’t. I guess I should say, yet, because we will. But the people I use to do some of this work are relatively expensive because they're highly skilled. There's obviously an argument that says they can be replaced by AI. I don't really see that at a very top level. I think the people skills, the soft skills they use, the languages they speak, and their ability to have five different languages in their heads at one time and be all over their nuance is really hard to replicate. But there are elements, when it comes to extracting important information from a big data dump, that is ripe for using AI. We are making strides in that direction. On the cybersecurity side of things where information is more rigidly defined or slightly more tangible, there is more success with AI at that level, but it is still nascent.

When I was in corporate land doing similar things, there were much better funded people trying to do this. And up until April this year, they weren't making a lot of progress. There was work being done, with some successes, and a lot of failures. And the failures actually are misleading in the sense that they look pretty good from afar, but when you dig under the hood, actually they've missed a lot of things and they've gotten some things wrong. Because it's about being able to tie together facts within the patterns and that’s about instincts and memory. It's very human work and I don't know if that's replicable.

LD: What’s something that you’d tell lawyers who are considering working with Blue Highway?

MT: There’s so much value in clarity around a subject and breadth around a subject. There are so few things now where online is not a factor, literally every case will have these elements within it. I really encourage lawyers to open themselves up to this work. An enlightened lawyer will understand that if they use investigators in the real world, they need to use investigators like us in the digital world. It will help their case and they'll be more successful as they do. And if they don't, they'll ultimately get left behind because the internet waits for no man or woman.

If you're in the public eye, live your digital life as you want to, but understand the implications, know what you're saying. Because people can see what they can't see – it's really easy.

If you're representing somebody in a case, invest in having a good picture of what's out there on the internet about them. It’s crucial background understanding because the other side is going to do that, and you don't want to be surprised.

If you're in the public eye, live your digital life as you want to, but understand the implications, know what you're saying. Because people can see what they can't see – it's really easy. In my government work, if we wanted to know about a person, we would build what we called a target pack or a pattern of life. We learn where they live, who their friends are, what their hobbies are, how they spend their money, what they think about when they go to church – all those things.

Most people don't think about protecting themselves. Phones have got torches you can download off the app store. That app, when you accept the terms and conditions, you give it access to everything on your phone – pictures, address lists, everything. Six and a half million people have downloaded that, for reasons that baffle me. The company who made that app didn't do it because they wanted to make an app, they did it because they wanted all that data. They sell it, and can only do that because we the users just give it to them in the first place. There is a familiar line, that if something is free then you the user are the product; it’s old, it’s maybe the first tired internet adage, but like many such things it is still true. By the way, my children are banned from the internet until they're at least 30 years old.