copperbadge:

That’s a damn good question.

My instinctive reaction is that catching a supervillain is easier; that’s actually been done using tax records. There was an instance where a very rich asshole was attempting to purchase a small liberal arts college by getting all his cronies on the board – he made a HUGE donation anonymously and then started saying “Hey I’ve got this pal who wants to get involved, he’d love to be on the board, and he’s got fifty grand to donate to prove his bona fides.”

This is actually pretty standard procedure – board members are expected to be significant donors – but where it got weird was that he was the one making the donation, not the board member, and he was doing it repeatedly. He was basically buying board seats for his pals, who then acted as a puppet board for his desires. The school was not aware of this.

When shit started going down in ways that made the student body uncomfortable – faculty being fired, the president being replaced – a sophomore at the school went into the publicly available tax data, the Form 990s, for his foundation and found out that he was the one doing all this. She incited an uprising at the school and got the puppet board thrown out. She basically stopped a supervillain. (He was also behind a really racist anti-Muslim PR campaign nationwide, so he was genuinely an evil man. And remains evil, we actually have a note about him on file that says, in more gentle terms, “Evil man, bad touch.”) But she could do that mainly because his foundation had publicly available records – and he thought nobody knew to look at HIS foundation because he’d made the donation anonymously.

The thing about what we do is that we only access two kinds of data: Data we have on the donor because they’ve given it to us (ie, they told a staff member they’d just adopted a child, or that they own a boat) and publicly available data, which can take the form of public tax/real estate/criminal filings, public acknowledgements of donations to other organizations, newspaper articles, interviews, et cetera. There’s a lot of debate in research circles about using stuff like the Sony hack to find out salary data, and some debate about using social media, but that’s another story. 

In terms of public records, when a good person is doing something good, it doesn’t look like a front. It just looks like them doing something good. When a bad person is doing something bad, either they have to engage in cover ups or the public record looks hinky – and cover-ups often make the public record look hinky anyway. So in theory if I didn’t know Steve Rogers was Captain America, and I was researching Steve Rogers, I might note that he gives to the Captain America Kids’ Home in the amount of XX dollars. I might note that he owns a home close to where Captain America has been spotted buying milk. I might find out that he owns a warehouse nearby (his secret base!) but I’d have no way of knowing it was his secret base unless I physically went to visit it, and that’s considered declasse. 

If he were dumb enough to file a patent for the Captain America Auto-Shield-Flinging-Glove, or to be president of the Captain America Kids’ Home or something similar, then I might get suspicious. But if he was that obvious the newspapers probably would have gotten there first. And a nice guy who lives in Brooklyn, has some real estate investments near his home, and gives to an orphanage…that’s not really enough to build a case. Stuff like “funding a secret research lab to build toys for Batman to use”, that is buried deep in a company’s financials at a level that isn’t usually available to the public, though it might be available to stockholders in the company if the company is public. And while Steve’s salary as a federal employee should be public, nothing about what he does for SHIELD necessarily is beyond his job description, which is probably “Specialest Specialist”. (Tony got to name his position.)

I’ll give you an example about the kinds of inferences I can draw. I just researched a couple who gave fifty million dollars for research to a mildly embarrassing disease (having to do with the butt) and a million dollars to environmental concerns in the south Pacific. Nice people, right? Maybe one of them had the embarrassing butt disease, that’s why they gave the money. Maybe they love the South Pacific.

But I also know that this couple has never publicly said anything about having an embarrassing butt disease – what I do know is that they won a settlement in court worth fifty million dollars, and they claim to have given that settlement to charity (they are billionaires so this wasn’t a big deal).

So did they, out of spite, take fifty million dollars off someone who had wronged them and give it to the American Embarrassing Butt Disease Research Institute as a way of telling their enemy to stick it up their ass? I like to think so. And that one million they gave to environmental concerns? That donation came after they were publicly accused in several newspapers of destroying the local economy and ecology in a business deal. Not hard to see why they made the donation.

So I can’t tell who’s a superhero, generally. But I can tell when someone is giving money a) out of spite (it’s more common than you think!) or b) out of self-interest, and I hope in the course of my career to unmask one or two supervillains.