Chan's Personal Blog

I picked up the term "Garbology" from that spy reality show that I've been watching. Garbology is an actual academic science that studies garbage. Officially, garbology is defined as "the study of a society or culture by examining or analyzing its refuse."

The show taught the recruits about garbology because there's a lot of intelligence that can be gathered through garbage. Intelligence agents needed this skill because they typically have to gather information on a person they wish to recruit or spy on. One of the standard practices was to collect a target's garbage for five weeks, and analyze it for clues and information.

Each recruit was given a bag of garbage to sift through, and they had to report back to their instructors about what intelligence they managed to gather. They were able to determine the following:

• The number of kids in the household.
• Bank account numbers.
• Whether the target was sexually active or not.
• Whether the target was gay or straight.
• The school that the kids attended.
• What religion they followed, and which church they attended.
• A rough idea of the age of the target.
• Whether the target was a smoker or non-smoker.
• Phone numbers and addresses of friends and family.
• Birthdates.
• Whether the target used drugs or other illicit materials.
• Etc.

That's an awful lot of private information that can be gathered from garbage. Furthermore, that's probably why it is illegal to steal people's garbage. Even shredded and ripped confidential documents could be pieced back together by a determined intelligence team. Surprisingly, some information could be gathered from paper that had been roughly burned.

One of the funniest quotes came from one of the recruits who said, "a man can only dig through so much cat litter to find that scrap of intelligence."

The wikipedia has a short article on garbology if you'd like to find out a little more. Apparently the University of Arizona offers courses in garbology. Neat!

Well, I'm off to shred, burn, and bury all my garbage.