Chapter 1. Our Espionage Toolkit

The job of espionage is to gather and analyze data. This requires us to use computers and software tools.

The ordinary desktop tools (word processor, spreadsheet, and so on) will not measure up for the kinds of jobs we need to tackle. For serious data gathering, analysis, and dissemination, we need more powerful tools. As we look at automating our data gathering, we can't easily use a desktop tool that requires manual pointing and clicking. We want a tool that can be left to run autonomously working for us without anyone sitting at a desk.

One of the most powerful data analysis tools we can use is Python. We're going to step through a series of examples of real data collection and analysis using Python. This chapter ...

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