Investigating the Investigators  – Anthropology News

Article begins

How do private investigators look for clues amongst the signal and the noise of our social lives? And what happens when everything is suspected and nothing known for sure?

It was about ten o’clock in the morning, mid-November, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain on the hills. I was sitting at a table with John Keegan, a private investigator in a medium-sized British city. Like most people in his profession, Keegan has never had an office with his name engraved on the glass in the door. Although he keeps a registered address, it is purely for appearances sake—part of his online presence as much as anything—and he usually works at the kitchen table or sitting in his car. As we talked, Keegan explained that the cases coming to him in the last week included an apparently bogus beauty therapist and a long-lost father. The job he was working on that morning was a repeat customer, a bachelor in his fifties who had found love online, but now suspected that his thirty-year-old fiancé was defrauding him. 

Keegan told me that many of his clients seem to be inspired by the fictional portrayal of private eyes. In the world of the hard-boiled detective novel, private investigators cut through the confusions of modern life, providing insight into the hidden forces shaping our lives. Many of Keegan’s clients appeared to hope he could do the same. It is hard to overestimate the ways television, fiction and film have shaped the imagination of what private investigators can do. Even the opening line of this essay is mediocre pastiche of a famous novel. Actually existing private detectives like Keegan lament the ways they are portrayed on the page and on screen, but also recognise that in many ways it is the best advertising they might have.

Since 2022 I have been looking for the detectives. The profession first emerged in nineteenth century Britain, France and the US, operating in the spaces created by newly created police forces and the anonymity of urbanization. Contemporary private investigators work in the context of cultures of suspicion and transparency, where although we might feel our lives are monitored and accessible, there is still a sense that more is going on than meets the eye. The question I have been trying to answer is why do private investigators so capture the imagination, and what does this reveal about the ways we seek to know one another?

The historian Carlo Ginzburg has argued that private investigators work by looking for clues that reveal otherwise hidden processes. They pick up the debris of our lives—both real and metaphorical, and ask what, if anything, it reveals. In doing so, they can be understood as trying to distinguish between the background noise and the signal, looking for the clues that shout out something meaningful amongst all the feedback of our everyday lives. But how do they, or we for that matter, know the difference between the two? 

In many ways private investigators are not so different from anthropologists, who have often—not unproblematically—prided ourselves in the ability to reveal opaque realities, distinguishing the signal of cultural meaning from the noise of ethnographic detail. This has taken an analytical mode that seeks to uncover social and cultural processes, or an investigatory style that seeks to counter denial. The issue for private investigators—and anthropologists—is whether the seemingly random debris left behind by our interactions is waste to be discarded or has other values and meanings? When is the detail revealing of something that would otherwise remain hidden, and when is it simply worthless?

Over fifty years ago, at the advent of the digital age, French information scientist Abraham Moles argued that there “is no absolute structural difference between noise and signal”. For Moles, “a noise is a signal that the sender does not want to transmit”. But this assumes meaning and significance lie in the intention to communicate. What, for example, if we do not always know why we do things? And what if intentions are irrelevant to the things we want to know? Above all, private investigators increasingly depend on finding clues in the digital traces we often unintentionally leave behind. In society where information about ourselves is commodified to be bought and sold by the highest bidder, and where the basic infrastructure of communication is designed to multiply our digital footprints, the challenge is to work out which traces are meaningful, for whom and in what way. For private investigators, anything in the digital society might be noise. Or it might be signal. 

When I went looking for private investigators, they were not so easy to track down. The involvement of several members of the profession—many of whom were sent to jail—in the celebrity “phone hacking”scandals of the last decade had made them apprehensive. British private investigators have never been quite as successful as their American counterparts, where large corporate firms like Pinkerton and Burns have been established for around 150 years. Whilst larger firms certainly do exist in the UK, the vast majority of firms are like Keegan’s—small, one-person operations—and are often former police or army officers supplementing their pensions. 

Keegan had kindly let me shadow his work, agreeing to go over his cases and talk about his long experience in the profession. The cold November day we sat around his kitchen table, drinking tea, surrounded by his grandchildren’s toys, we were only interrupted when his elderly dog needed to be let into the garden. Keegan had been an investigator for over twenty years, and it had not improved his views on human nature. He was adamant, though, that he was provided a much-needed service, often for people who had been badly let down by others and did not know where else to turn. 

The day-to-day reality of a private investigator is mundane and prosaic. Bathos dominates. Keegan’s bread-and-butter work was tracking people down, and the easiest and most obvious place to start was online. Social media, though, was of less and less help. For all the talk of “cultures of confession,” Keegan was increasingly finding that people under forty would rarely leave anything that identified them on Facebook or Instagram. Like many other private investigators, he relied instead on commercially available databases—produced largely for credit checking—that bring together our digital footprint. These databases are very noisy. Their accuracy can depend on people putting in reliable information when they absentmindedly fill in details in online forms. When my own name is entered, it pulls up all of my addresses going back to the late 1990s, as well as a few places I have never lived, email addresses that were seemingly made up, and people I have never lived with or simply used my home to send a parcel to one point. The signals people send between themselves risk becoming misinterpreted feedback for those standing outside of the original interaction. A digital economy that finds ways to turn minute social interactions into commodities can quickly fade away into a low hum once we try and unpick it.

Significantly, it is not always entirely clear what clients are asking private investigators to do or to find out. It is usually obvious something is wrong, that they feel uneasy or suspicious, they have a feeling that things were not quite right, but beyond that it can be hard to say. One of the key jobs of a private investigator is to try and work out exactly what a customer is trying to find out and whether they are the right person to do it. Some private investigators think it is simply not their responsibility to sort through their clients’ desires, hopes and aspirations, particularly when clients might not know themselves. Often, it seems that people would be better off going to a marriage counsellor, therapist, or even a priest, but it is hard to tell. The requests made to private investigators are themselves noisy.

That morning in his kitchen, Keegan said he had managed to track down the address of his client’s fiancé, using an email address. The database seemed to show that there was a middle-aged couple and a child living there. Not an unmarried thirty-year-old woman. Keegan then rang a few of the neighbours, using a pretext, and they seemed to confirm the residents of the address were a family of three. It was not clear whether the family were behind the ruse or were merely collateral. This was far from definitive evidence, but the money this client was paying would not go far enough for a personal visit. 

There is a wealth of information out there which Keegan could use. But once there is a sense that there might be more going on than meets the eye, unanswered questions just open up more questions. It becomes largely irrelevant whether the evidence being examined is signal or noise. It is always both. There is always more to possibly find out, more information to gather, but none of it is inherently definitive, and all of it might either be irrelevant or deeply revealing. There are always more stones to be uncovered. Noise quickly turns into signal, and signal into noise, when suspicion dominates all the way down.

As he closed off the case of the fiancé, Keegan wrote a short descriptive report and emailed it off. He would be unlikely to find out what the client would do with the information. There are few last page revelations in this line of work.

Taras Fedirko and Whitney Russell are section contributing editors for the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology.