Book Image

Python for Secret Agents - Volume II - Second Edition

By : Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Python for Secret Agents - Volume II - Second Edition

By: Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

Python is easy to learn and extensible programming language that allows any manner of secret agent to work with a variety of data. Agents from beginners to seasoned veterans will benefit from Python's simplicity and sophistication. The standard library provides numerous packages that move beyond simple beginner missions. The Python ecosystem of related packages and libraries supports deep information processing. This book will guide you through the process of upgrading your Python-based toolset for intelligence gathering, analysis, and communication. You'll explore the ways Python is used to analyze web logs to discover the trails of activities that can be found in web and database servers. We'll also look at how we can use Python to discover details of the social network by looking at the data available from social networking websites. Finally, you'll see how to extract history from PDF files, which opens up new sources of data, and you’ll learn about the ways you can gather data using an Arduino-based sensor device.
Table of Contents (7 chapters)
6
Index

What do they seem to be talking about?

Finding the social network is only the first step. We want to examine the conversation, also. We'll look at two aspects of this conversion: words and pictures. Our first background mission in this section was to be sure we had Pillow working properly. This will also help us download pictures.

Words are somewhat simpler. Interestingly, the tweet content isn't obvious in the Twitter API definitions. It turns out that "status" is what we're looking for. The resource called statuses/user_timeline has the tweets made by a given user.

Each status or tweet is packaged with a collection of entities. These are the URL references, media attachments, @ user_mentions, # hashtags, and $ symbols. The entities are separated from the body of the tweet, which greatly simplifies our analysis.

Here's a function to get the last 20 tweets from a user:

def tweets_by_screen_name(screen_name):
    api = TwitterAPI(consumer_key,
                 ...