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I wonder how much of a business the reverse would be. A "reputation archive" company that keeps vouched copies of potentially harmful dirt on "the powerful", a

I wonder how much of a business the reverse would be. A "reputation archive" company that keeps vouched copies of potentially harmful dirt on "the powerful", available on demand. Sure you can do opposition research to dig up things, but why go through that effort when you can simply wait passively and harvest later?

belter 5y ago
Wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/ https://web.archive.org/
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
> A "reputation archive" company that keeps vouched copies of potentially harmful dirt on "the powerful", available on demand. These companies do exist; I tried to google but came up empty, but I've heard that there are companies that keep collections of dirt on people like politicians, that can be released at strategic times (e.g. before elections). It's likely the various 'secret' services around the world have similar caches, like this rumour that the Kremlin had 'kompromat' on Trump (camera footage of prostitutes pissing on him or something), threatening to release it if he didn't do as they told him. I mean nothing came of that, as far as we know, so it might've just been propaganda, but it sounds plausible enough - both that Trump would be doing that, and that the KGB or whatever it is these days would have cameras in dignitaries' hotel rooms.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  If Trump frequented sex workers surely some evidence would have shown up? It’s not like he’s discreet about his marriages, affairs and dalliances. He doesn’t appear to be capable of shutting up.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    Didn’t one of those sex workers [0] get paid to sign an NDA about the sex? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormy_Daniels–Donald_Trump_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormy_Daniels–Donald_Trump_sc... [0] sex worker in this case being porn actress not AFAIK a prostitute; I don’t know which of “porn star” or “prostitute” would’ve been more damaging in the view of Trump’s advisers with regard to his expected electoral result at the time, as American cultural attitudes to sexuality are basically alien to me.
  - mlac 5y ago
    It’s damaging on a whole other level to have video of someone peeing on the president of the United States. Maybe his core would say “that’s fake, but even if it’s real, then hey, what he’s into, he’s into - people can do weird stuff”. But actually seeing the video of someone peeing on the president of the United States is humiliating for the party and the country, and would (maybe?) be enough to have him sidelined. They could argue “respect the office, not the person”, but the counter would quickly be “if a person doesn’t have enough respect to not be peed on by another human being, then maybe they shouldn’t hold the office”. I mean - it would just be replayed over and over and the Streisand effect would take hold. Any pro-trump person would probably have to wade through replies with links of him being urinated on. Quickly jokes would come up about him taking crap, it’d be thrown into debates. Chants would be made… the little decal of the guy peeing on stuff would quickly be put over trump name or campaign stickers.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    It’s not like he’s discreet He's paid off & NDA'ed a few known people, it's possible that not everyone he's done that with bothered to come forward once he was president. He may appear indiscreet merely because his efforts failed in two cases but not in others. Those two failures show that he was making significant efforts to keep this sort of thing discreet. This is by no means intended as an argument that additional incidents like this took place, only the observation that claiming something that already has precedent didn't happen again because "evidence would have shown up" is flawed justification.
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    It happened enough that he had a business arrangement with the National Enquirer to pay for and kill the stories. Also “Stormy Daniels”. The genius of Trump is that he’s able to normalize it. He had scandals every week that would take down most people.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    You miss how enormously vindictive and litigious he is. What sex worker wants to spend years getting sued, having every negative aspect of their life dragged into the public spotlight, etc, etc?
- hunterb123 5y ago
MadSudaca 5y ago
One problem is that often you can’t tell who’s going to be powerful in advance. So by the time they go under the spotlight, they have had time to clean up their dirt.
- titzer 5y ago
  When you have 20,000 quadrillion bytes of storage, you can just do everyone.
- rdtwo 5y ago
  You have to probably backup Reddit, and all forums that are related to views you oppose there can’t be that much organic content out there.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ben_w 5y ago
How do you know if you’re looking at a real honest archive, or someone that inserted libel (or even just reputation damaging BS below the threshold for libel) in exchange for money? Although the phrase “fake news” itself is a used as a magic wand to dismiss uncomfortable facts, this can and does happen.
- wongarsu 5y ago
  The best way around that would be basically a list of internet archive snapshots of newspaper articles. You can probably automate it somewhat by watching relevant newspapers, submitting everything for archival at a trusted 3rd party, then checking what gets removed by the publication or delisted at google.
  - toyg 5y ago
    There used to be sites that would do this diffing on news-sites, I even tried building one at some point. The idea was to reduce the memory-hole effect that the web infrastructure has produced and promoted. I remember Mark Pilgrim at one point targeting Dave Winer with something like that, as they were feuding and Winer is/was known for rewriting his blogposts.
Spooky23 5y ago
I’m sure someone is operating a company doing this already. Opposition research is a thing.
dboreham 5y ago
It's called "The National Enquirer"
bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
There are sites in tourist towns that publish pictures of mugshots and then charge you to take them down. Had a friend get arrested while drunk and have to pay to get his picture taken down.
wpietri 5y ago
Seems like it might be monetizeable through ads, as soon you'd be the top search result for a bunch of terms that otherwise won't have good hits. While I was developing my @sfships Twitter bot, I needed to look up a ton of locodes, 5-character codes for "economically significant" places. The agency in charge of them releases it as CSV and Microsoft Access files, so it's a pain to quickly access the data. I said, "fuck this" and turned it into a website. E.g.: https://locode.info/USNYC https://locode.info/USNYC On a lark, I put some Google Ads on it; a few times a year Google sends me $100. More than enough to pay for the site itself. Given that I haven't touched it in a few years that's good enough for me.
thom 5y ago
Surely an even better business would be to _create_ this dirt? All you'd need is a jet, a private island, and an international human trafficking ring. You'd be set for life!
kodah 5y ago
> A "reputation archive" company that keeps vouched copies of potentially harmful dirt on "the powerful", available on demand. Sounds like you've come up with a business plan even more harmful than Facebook. When I did some volunteer work with a Progressive organization I found out that there's an underground of people who do exactly this work. Their archives are private, though, and I can't speak to their vetting process. When I learned about it the only thing I could say was, "This sounds like professionalized character assassination."
- rdtwo 5y ago
  This does not surprise me that it exists. I’m sure they target every conservative forum and back it up. Then when a person becomes political they cross check all of these for incriminating data.
  - kodah 5y ago
    I don't think they're that well funded, there are people like that on the right as well. Someone else mentioned it has a more friendly name of "opposition research"
- thrown_22 5y ago

belter 5y ago

Wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/ https://web.archive.org/

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

> A "reputation archive" company that keeps vouched copies of potentially harmful dirt on "the powerful", available on demand. These companies do exist; I tried to google but came up empty, but I've heard that there are companies that keep collections of dirt on people like politicians, that can be released at strategic times (e.g. before elections). It's likely the various 'secret' services around the world have similar caches, like this rumour that the Kremlin had 'kompromat' on Trump (camera footage of prostitutes pissing on him or something), threatening to release it if he didn't do as they told him. I mean nothing came of that, as far as we know, so it might've just been propaganda, but it sounds plausible enough - both that Trump would be doing that, and that the KGB or whatever it is these days would have cameras in dignitaries' hotel rooms.

barry-cotter 5y ago
If Trump frequented sex workers surely some evidence would have shown up? It’s not like he’s discreet about his marriages, affairs and dalliances. He doesn’t appear to be capable of shutting up.
- ben_w 5y ago
  Didn’t one of those sex workers [0] get paid to sign an NDA about the sex? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormy_Daniels–Donald_Trump_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormy_Daniels–Donald_Trump_sc... [0] sex worker in this case being porn actress not AFAIK a prostitute; I don’t know which of “porn star” or “prostitute” would’ve been more damaging in the view of Trump’s advisers with regard to his expected electoral result at the time, as American cultural attitudes to sexuality are basically alien to me.
- mlac 5y ago
  It’s damaging on a whole other level to have video of someone peeing on the president of the United States. Maybe his core would say “that’s fake, but even if it’s real, then hey, what he’s into, he’s into - people can do weird stuff”. But actually seeing the video of someone peeing on the president of the United States is humiliating for the party and the country, and would (maybe?) be enough to have him sidelined. They could argue “respect the office, not the person”, but the counter would quickly be “if a person doesn’t have enough respect to not be peed on by another human being, then maybe they shouldn’t hold the office”. I mean - it would just be replayed over and over and the Streisand effect would take hold. Any pro-trump person would probably have to wade through replies with links of him being urinated on. Quickly jokes would come up about him taking crap, it’d be thrown into debates. Chants would be made… the little decal of the guy peeing on stuff would quickly be put over trump name or campaign stickers.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  It’s not like he’s discreet He's paid off & NDA'ed a few known people, it's possible that not everyone he's done that with bothered to come forward once he was president. He may appear indiscreet merely because his efforts failed in two cases but not in others. Those two failures show that he was making significant efforts to keep this sort of thing discreet. This is by no means intended as an argument that additional incidents like this took place, only the observation that claiming something that already has precedent didn't happen again because "evidence would have shown up" is flawed justification.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  It happened enough that he had a business arrangement with the National Enquirer to pay for and kill the stories. Also “Stormy Daniels”. The genius of Trump is that he’s able to normalize it. He had scandals every week that would take down most people.
- wpietri 5y ago
  You miss how enormously vindictive and litigious he is. What sex worker wants to spend years getting sued, having every negative aspect of their life dragged into the public spotlight, etc, etc?
hunterb123 5y ago

MadSudaca 5y ago

One problem is that often you can’t tell who’s going to be powerful in advance. So by the time they go under the spotlight, they have had time to clean up their dirt.

titzer 5y ago
When you have 20,000 quadrillion bytes of storage, you can just do everyone.
rdtwo 5y ago
You have to probably backup Reddit, and all forums that are related to views you oppose there can’t be that much organic content out there.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ben_w 5y ago

How do you know if you’re looking at a real honest archive, or someone that inserted libel (or even just reputation damaging BS below the threshold for libel) in exchange for money? Although the phrase “fake news” itself is a used as a magic wand to dismiss uncomfortable facts, this can and does happen.

wongarsu 5y ago
The best way around that would be basically a list of internet archive snapshots of newspaper articles. You can probably automate it somewhat by watching relevant newspapers, submitting everything for archival at a trusted 3rd party, then checking what gets removed by the publication or delisted at google.
- toyg 5y ago
  There used to be sites that would do this diffing on news-sites, I even tried building one at some point. The idea was to reduce the memory-hole effect that the web infrastructure has produced and promoted. I remember Mark Pilgrim at one point targeting Dave Winer with something like that, as they were feuding and Winer is/was known for rewriting his blogposts.

Spooky23 5y ago

I’m sure someone is operating a company doing this already. Opposition research is a thing.

dboreham 5y ago

It's called "The National Enquirer"

bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago

There are sites in tourist towns that publish pictures of mugshots and then charge you to take them down. Had a friend get arrested while drunk and have to pay to get his picture taken down.

wpietri 5y ago

Seems like it might be monetizeable through ads, as soon you'd be the top search result for a bunch of terms that otherwise won't have good hits. While I was developing my @sfships Twitter bot, I needed to look up a ton of locodes, 5-character codes for "economically significant" places. The agency in charge of them releases it as CSV and Microsoft Access files, so it's a pain to quickly access the data. I said, "fuck this" and turned it into a website. E.g.: https://locode.info/USNYC https://locode.info/USNYC On a lark, I put some Google Ads on it; a few times a year Google sends me $100. More than enough to pay for the site itself. Given that I haven't touched it in a few years that's good enough for me.

thom 5y ago

Surely an even better business would be to _create_ this dirt? All you'd need is a jet, a private island, and an international human trafficking ring. You'd be set for life!

kodah 5y ago

> A "reputation archive" company that keeps vouched copies of potentially harmful dirt on "the powerful", available on demand. Sounds like you've come up with a business plan even more harmful than Facebook. When I did some volunteer work with a Progressive organization I found out that there's an underground of people who do exactly this work. Their archives are private, though, and I can't speak to their vetting process. When I learned about it the only thing I could say was, "This sounds like professionalized character assassination."

rdtwo 5y ago
This does not surprise me that it exists. I’m sure they target every conservative forum and back it up. Then when a person becomes political they cross check all of these for incriminating data.
- kodah 5y ago
  I don't think they're that well funded, there are people like that on the right as well. Someone else mentioned it has a more friendly name of "opposition research"
thrown_22 5y ago