Python for Secret Agents - Volume II

Chapter 5. Data Collection Gadgets

We've looked at gathering intelligence from web server logs, from the social network, and from hard-to-examine PDF files. In this chapter, we'll see how we can gather data from the real world—the space that isn't inside our computers. This can be poetically termed meatspace to distinguish it from the cyberspace of networked computers.

There are a large number of small, programmable devices with sophisticated network interfaces, processes, and memory. We'll focus on the Arduino family of processors as a way to gather data for analysis. Some agents will prefer to use other processors because they're less expensive, more sophisticated, or have different programming language support.

Our goal is to build our own gadget ...