Chapter 4 - Discovery Areas
There are an infinite number of things that an interrogator might wish to learn about, and the information they gather can be significant. However, it is not necessary to memorize everything you hear, just to know what is significant - and what is significant is determined what they pertain to.
Considered from that perspective, there are only four categories for most forms of interrogation - people, places, things, and events - and sifting through large amounts of information is easier if you can associate the details accordingly.
(EN: Dropping a note here after reading the chapter - I don't have a sense that the content that follows is particularly useful for anything. Unless he expands upon it in later chapters to demonstrate how this categorization can be used, there doesn't seem to be a point.)
Discovery Area #1: People
Information about people can be further digested into two subcategories - the category of information and the category of people.
Categories of Information
There are three basic kinds of information about a person: personal information, professional information, and relationship information.
"Personal Information" includes basic information about the individual - his name, where he lives, and the like. It may also consider information about his believes and attitudes about certain things, which are parts of his personality or point of view.
"Professional Information" pertain to the activities in which a person involves himself, which for most people is their job (but may also be education, hobbies, interests, and other activities in which they are commonly engaged). It includes not only the things a person does, but the idiosyncratic way that he goes about doing them.
"Relationship Information" pertains to the way in which an individual is connected to others in society - their family, spouse, friends, coworkers, and others with whom they routinely interact.
The author observes that two types of personal information are often considered sensitive: information about personal finances and information about relationships. These need to be questioned delicately and the information you gather treated with the utmost secrecy.
Categories of People
The author sorts people into four categories, in relation to the way in which they respond to questioning: integrator, dictator, commentator, and evader.
"Integrator" types are slow to respond to questions, and often try to figure out what you are attempting to discover as a way of providing a good answer to your questions. The integrator pays attention to context, and considers not only the present question but others you have asked them in the past.
"Dictator" types answer questions definitively - their answers are intended to be direct, complete, and incontrovertible. Businessmen and politicians often fall into this category, particularly when they are interviewed in public.
"Commentator" types provide complete answers that tend to include more detail than you asked for, as they consider questions to be multifaceted, or answers to be qualified by context. People who are inclined to be social often fall into this category, and regard questions as an invitation to engage in a lengthier discussion. When they happen to provide information that's relevant to your investigation, they can be very productive - but when they take off in the wrong direction, they can cloud issues with lots of irrelevant information.
"Evader" types see interrogation as an intrusion or an attack and wish to avoid providing any information at all. Sometimes, they are avoiding questions because they have something to hide, but in other instances they are suspicious of the interrogator's motives. There are various tactics that can be used to evade - from saying as little as possible, to providing a response that misdirects the question, by begging the question, by merely being contrary, etc.
Discovery Area #2: Places
Information related to a place may pertain to its location, appearance, layout, function, or relation to other places.
He goes on a bit of a tare about getting directions from someone (the location of a place relative to another place, typically where one is right now) and insists most people are very bad at this and requires you to be rather patient and persistent in getting sufficient information. He speaks to the various ways people consider a location and a route - whether it's by landmarks and street names or compass directions and distances or turns and times. You can ask multiple people directions and they will each express them in different ways.
(EN: It's an interesting perspective, but likely better to be explored by a cognitive psychologist rather than an interrogator. I'll cut the author short on that account.)
He does provide a list of questions hat can be asked to convert directions that are communicated in one mode to a different one. For example, to convert turn-based directions to compass points, ask the person where the sun is when they make a left turn. To turn time-based into distance-based, ask the speed limit and travel time.
(EN: Two points of interest. First, the interrogator must recognize what he is doing is translating other peoples directions into terms he understands based on his own preference. Second, if the interrogator is able to step into various models for location, he can ask questions that verify the directions.)
Discovery Area #3: Things
The author provides a categorization schema for things that seem entirely arbitrary and quite lacking: mechanical things, electronics, structural, processes, concepts, and expendable items.
He then presents a sample dialog in which an interrogator gathers information by asking someone who is familiar with a thing about it - what it is called, what it does, how it works, when it would be needed, who might use it, etc.
A question about components opens up another universe of questions, as each component of a thing may be treated as a thing unto itself, and investigated.
Discovery Area #4: Events in Time
Events are of special interest to interrogators, as the majority of instances in which interrogation is used is to discover what happened and when - piecing together a sequence of events in which people, places, and things were involved in a way that suggests causality.
This is done to determine who is responsible for something that happened in the past, or to predict what might happen in the future. The author mentions that military intelligence is largely focused on the future, as its goal is to discover what action might be taken to prevent something unfortunate from happening. The courts and justice systems are more focused on the past to punish crime, but generally with the intention of preventing it from happening again by making an example of the perpetrator.
Two qualities of an event that are of particular interest are "why" and "how" - the objects, locations, and people are often incidental.
He mentions that sequences of occurrence can be investigated from beginning to end, worked from end to beginning, or collected in fragments. Often, it can be useful to take things out of sequence to enable us to overcome our preconceptions - or when questioning someone, to ask out of sequence to confound their attempts to lie (it's easier to build a lie when questions are asked in chronological or reverse-chronological order).
Chapter Summary
In the course of an interrogation, you are generally interested in finding out about one thing (person, place, thing, or event) and will ask most questions in that category, but branching out to others may sometimes be useful in gathering additional information.
With that in mind, he suggests visualizing an investigation as four squares - one for each of the categories, and deciding where your current investigation fits - it is typically in one of the areas, but there is almost always some overlap into the others.
(EN: I don't expect this is the best approach, as the amount of each area included in the space of the investigation would be influenced by how the four are arranged - and I don't think any of these concepts is the opposite of the others.)