11 ms·

Exploring the Paramilitary Leaks

239 points by namenumber 2y ago

cpufry 2y ago
[dead]
lurk2 2y ago
> This is why this dataset is hard to wrap your head around: there's just sooo much here. It would take a ridiculous amount of time to try to manually read through it all. Also, at a glance at least, it appears that the bulk of it is idle chatter and conspiracy nonsense, presumably with evidence of crimes sprinkled in here or there. Not exactly hard-hitting journalism. He then goes on to speculate that Scot Seddon's disavowal of the January 6th protests was disingenuous, and that his true feelings would be revealed in chat logs after Trump was re-elected. But: > This is much more readable – but still, I don't think I can bring myself to sit down and read 77 pages of these messages right now. And that's just this one export of this one Telegram channel. So the guy complaining about conspiracy theories goes on to invent his own despite having access to potentially corroborative data that he simply can't be bothered to read.
- dskrvk 2y ago
  The guy is just walking us through the process of analyzing the dataset. He’s not really making any conclusions at this point - it’s like a technical tutorial for journalists.
  - lurk2 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - akdor1154 2y ago
      That wasn't my reading. My reading was that it was a natural question for someone to try and find in the dataset, so would serve well as a motivating example. Yes it's politically sensitive, but it's going to be difficult to find motivating examples in this dataset that aren't.
    - lukan 2y ago
      No claim. Just a question that could not be answered yet, because the search tools are lacking. And this was about the search tools, not Scott.
      - lurk2 2y ago
        Actually, you're right, he didn't explicitly state anything about Scot specifically, I just inferred it from his statement that the group chat "presumably" contained evidence of a crime. > Also, at a glance at least, it appears that the bulk of it is idle chatter and conspiracy nonsense, presumably with evidence of crimes sprinkled in here or there. [...] > Ahh, so he's the founder of American Patriot Three Percent, and here's his statement disavowing the violence from January 6, 2021. Looking at the metadata of this PDF, it was created on January 16, 2021. I wonder what Scot thinks about January 6 these days, after Trump was re-elected in 2024. > In all likelihood, I can find out exactly what he thinks, because he probably posted about it to his militia buddies in Telegram, and it's probably in this dataset. The problem is, there's no easy way to quickly filter out messages from him, or even to tell which of these exported Telegram channels he was part of. I think that will be the first problem I solve. While he doesn't come out and explicitly state: "Scot is lying about disavowing violence," I do think it's fairly obvious that this is what he's implying, given everything else he wrote.
        lukan 2y ago
        "While he doesn't come out and explicitly state: "Scot is lying about disavowing violence," I do think it's fairly obvious that this is what he's implying, given everything else he wrote." I read it as implying, go check for yourself!
        sepositus 2y ago
        The vibe I got was the whole article was a tutorial on how to consume a dataset for the purpose of breaking a story. An example story that would be great to break is Scot lying. So yeah, it does come off as biased, but maybe that's how journalism is done nowadays.
- roenxi 2y ago
  > Not exactly hard-hitting journalism. But nonetheless fascinating. There are must be some really good PhD thesii written (to be written?) about how someone is supposed to handle this sort of data dump with modern tooling. It is a non-trivial general problem; we have a lot of really data floating around in public (Panama papers, relatively transparent government info, dumps of less transparent info at wikileaks.org, OSINT of all shapes and sizes). Even if a body reads the whole thing they need some sort of solid mental schema going in or they'll end up in crank territory. Although why he thinks old mate would change his position on the Jan 6 riots is a mystery (and why he cares). Taking a stand against riots is one of those easy-win political options that costs nothing and almost everyone agrees with. Riots are fundamentally ineffective; I doubt anyone serious wants to be associated with rioters. I suppose stranger things happen.
  - hsshhshshjk 2y ago
    How about a whole book? > It's come to my attention that this dataset is rather challenging for journalists and researchers to wrap their heads around. I wrote a book, Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations, aimed at teaching journalists and researchers how to analyze datasets just like this.
    - lurk2 2y ago
      I didn't even catch that on my first reading.
  - bawolff 2y ago
    > Taking a stand against riots is one of those easy-win political options that costs nothing and almost everyone agrees with. Riots are fundamentally ineffective; I doubt anyone serious wants to be associated with rioters. I suppose stranger things happen. In full fairness "riots" is what its called when the rioters lose. If they win they are usually called something more positive and celebrated by the resulting new regime.
    - roenxi 2y ago
      There is a solid tradition of new regimes killing off the rioters because they are unruly troublemakers. Not a guarantee, but certainly a tendency. Nobody likes rioters when you get down to brass tacks.
- cvp 2y ago
  > So, I figured I'd write a series of posts publicly exploring this dataset and sharing my findings. > ... > At the end, I'll have a single database of Telegram messages from the whole dataset. I'll be able to query it to, for example, show me all messages from Scot Seddon sorted chronologically. This will make it simple to see what he was saying in the lead-up to January 6, immediately after January 6, and then what he's saying about Trump these days, after he was re-elected. There are more parts to come in this series, which is very clearly stated in the post.
  - lurk2 2y ago
    If I claim to have evidence that you committed a crime, and announce that I will post the evidence later, should my claims be taken seriously, or dismissed? Even if he's right (and I'm not saying he isn't), this kind of behavior is inexcusable (though completely expected) coming from a guy who calls himself a journalist.
- bawolff 2y ago
  > > This is much more readable – but still, I don't think I can bring myself to sit down and read 77 pages of these messages right now. And that's just this one export of this one Telegram channel. 77 pages isn't that much in the scheme of thing. A court case having 77 pages of evidence would be entirely normal.
  - pc86 2y ago
    And let's be honest 77 pages of telegram chats would probably take 15 or 20 minutes to read. It's not exactly Proust.
    - neom 2y ago
      Not that it's a great method but just for fun I gave a large chunk of it to an LLM to process and then asked it for the 20 most disturbing or nefarious things in the chats and it was incredibly boring. Most interesting thing I learned from the files is how many gun toting americans also drive dodge chargers.
      - pc86 2y ago
        I would have expected nice pickup trucks or any TRD Pro trim Toyota. I'd be curious if the LLM's own self-censorship would prevent it from reporting truly disturbing things. Maybe add one legitimately bad thing into the middle of a chat and see if it gets reported.
        neom 2y ago
        I'm fairly decent a prompt engineering I think, told it was for my art project of a creative writing class and I'd hidden 20 disturbing and nefarious things in the text (made sure to inject a fake murder into the text) - fake murder then a bunch of airsoft stuff, some psychological manipulation, and it oddly surfaced...some fb cookies, heh. 2mill tokens x3 runs
        Koffiepoeder 2y ago
- WatchDog 2y ago
  The author of the blog post, Micah Lee, appears to be one of the directors of Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets)[0]. DDoSecrets appears to be an anarchist/communist affiliated activist group. Basically you've got two groups from extreme sides of the political spectrum fighting each other, the Guy Fawkes LARPers upset about Jan 6 of all things, and the seal team 6 LARPers upset about "stolen" elections and ivermectin. [0]: https://ddosecrets.com/about https://ddosecrets.com/about
ferguess_k 2y ago
TBH I wouldn't be surprised if these organizations are infested with FBI agents.
- wildzzz 2y ago
  Even the small group that tried to kidnap Whitmer had a suspected 12 informants and agents (3 confirmed informants, 2 agents) in the group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_plot#FBI_informants_and_agents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_pl...
  - thinkingemote 2y ago
    It's also worth pointing out that this pattern is kind of common. As here, these agents are often at the very top. Almost all Organisations of Interest will be compromised at the leadership level. It's something most grass roots activists don't feel intuitively at all. They look for spies among their own level but it's almost always going to be the organisers, the helpers, the ones with the van, the one that can print your posters, the one with a bit of spare cash, the dude who can set up your server and the friendly friend with time to help you personally that are the spies. Logically it makes sense for a spy to be placed as high as possible to get more information, and yet activists look for spies among the rank and file. They look for odd people to label as the spy. They expel the outsider. They suspect the ones that don't fit in. But the spy is going to be a well adjusted normal insider that they already trust, almost always! I find it so interesting. It happens again and again. It's probably the same pattern for any group that attracts any government attention.
    - noneeeed 2y ago
      As I mentioned in another comment, one of the most amazing examples of this was the British Army/MI5 mole inside the IRA, Freddie Scappaticci, codenamed Steaknife. He was a leading member of the IRA's internal security team. It really feels counterintuitive that someone who has got to the top would be the one to turn, but it also makes sense that they would be the one's targetted.
mannyv 2y ago
With a big dump like this, the Disney one, Clinton's emails, efc - what would you want to be able to do?
- DANmode 2y ago
  Search, in a browser? Feed it to a local model? If so: Wikileaks made/makes(?) all of their stuff easily browseable, "her emails" included.
  - mannyv 2y ago
    You can search, but what do you search for if you don't know what's there?
    - lukan 2y ago
      "Evil plans of new world order" obviously.. It seems you want a AI to analyze the data in general? Otherwise you will have to do some work and read a little bit .. and then investigate to see if there is more. That is where the search tools are useful. Like in the example, finding out if that Scott guy changed his opinion on the 6. of january after Trump became president. (To see if the original statement was a lie. Not possible with ease so far) People will speak in code, if they are planning crimes. Only some idiots speak openly of violent revolution in public messengers.
    - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
      If you don't know what's there you just start from the top I suppose. That's what happened with the Snowden leaks, they were picked apart over the span of months if not years by journalists, publishing what they found was interesting.
      - mannyv 2y ago
        I suppose when you have a large corpus you start with as many browse points as you can. So maybe a list of the top senders, top recipients, recipient graphs. I'd think by day would be next. Browse subjects by day, and word clouds for each message thread? The. Try to isolate topics discussed each day, then link the topics across days. You should be able to click in and see the thread/messages/etc. This is, at some level, how legal discovery stuff works from what I understand.
getlawgdon 2y ago
In a dump like this, why would anyone truat that any given part of it is authentic? I could tell some great lies by embedding disinformation in a disseminated data dump like this.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  Skimming a fair chunk of it by hand (and some others have run it through LLMs) it seems extremely mundane. I also find the publisher's claims that he "[just can't] bring [him]self to sit down and read 77 pages of these messages right now" implausible. He's self promoting like crazy, is/was a professional reporter, and 77 pages of sparsely spaced telegram chats is like 30 minutes of reading. If there was some big story awaiting in those 77 pages (or the entire leak for that matter) he'd, with 100% certainty, want to be the one breaking it. So it's most likely just going to be an insight into a different culture/worldview, like reading e.g. /r/anarchism. In many ways this is also the same with the Clinton leaks. Unless one was just horrifically naive of how politics works, there was nothing particularly exceptional in it. The really wild stuff came from interpreting messages as having coded meanings.
  - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    77 pages of messages sounds like it's only a small percentage of communication in that group. I can imagine (also based on other comments about organizations like this being infiltrated by law enforcement) their communication networks are a lot more involved than Telegram chats or other "honeypotable" systems. Snowden revealed (or confirmed our suspicions that) the NSA has backdoor access to all major American based social media / communications, and the media broke at least twice about a major 'encrypted' chat / secure phone provider being compromised causing hundreds if not thousands of arrests worldwide. (note: arrests, because whether the chats were recorded legally and are admissable to court is a whole different matter)
  - sangnoir 2y ago
    > I also find the publisher's claims that he "[just can't] bring [him]self to sit down and read 77 pages of these messages right now" implausible. Read back a few sentences for the context - they aren't willing to ready 77 pages just to seek/isolate messages from one individual around a specific topic. I would expect a journalist to do this repeatedly for multiple individuals, so it makes sense to parse the data and make it queryable without having to read through hundreds/thousands of telegrams just to capture a few dozen
deleted 2y ago
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jfjrrirjrjrrjj 2y ago
[flagged]
- diggan 2y ago
  The source is https://ddosecrets.com/article/paramilitary-leaks https://ddosecrets.com/article/paramilitary-leaks which states > Over 200 gigabytes of chat logs and recordings from paramilitary groups and militias including American Patriots Three Percent (APIII) and the Oath Keepers So no, neither of those groups are anti-fascists (seemingly the opposite actually) or "far-left", and the resulting documentation is only from the groups the individual successfully infiltrated. Besides, how many bigger groups of militarized anti-fascist groups exists today in the US? I'm not from there, so don't know the situation, but from the outside it seems like mostly people on the right are the ones running the militias over there.
  - lurk2 2y ago
    > how many bigger groups of militarized anti-fascist groups exists today in the US? They tend to run largely independent scenes from city to city. You'll usually have anywhere from one to a dozen people acting as the core organizers of a given group. The groups range in size from around a dozen people to upwards of four hundred, depending on the city. Some cities might also have multiple groups active at a given time. I don't know what the scenes look like now but around 2018 I can remember at least two independent groups operating out of Portland, for example. These groups are usually no more than a phone tree of people they can mobilize for protests. Organizers may also be in contact with scenes from other cities; it's not uncommon for demonstrators to be bussed in to a protest from another city or state. It's quite rare for these groups to be truly "militarized." They often form violent mobs, but they rarely have any hierarchical structure beyond "leadership" (the organizers) and they don't generally make use of firearms. This has been changing in recent years; there have been a number of high-profile shootings involving Antifa-affiliated shooters.
    - diggan 2y ago
      > It's quite rare for these groups to be truly "militarized." They often form violent mobs, but they rarely have any hierarchical structure beyond "leadership" (the organizers) and they don't generally make use of firearms. This has been changing in recent years; there have been a number of high-profile shootings involving Antifa-affiliated shooters. Quite a long answer overall that boils down to "No, they don't exist" :) Would make sense if our friends in the US would also arm themselves, similar to militias on the right, but I wonder why that isn't the case? Even the non-extremists seems to have (to me) extremist opinions about guns, so I guess I'm kind of surprised only the far-right side got militarized compared to the left. I guess it gets a lot easier when you have more friends in the right (no pun intended) places.
Animats 2y ago
What the louder militia members and gun nuts are up to is no secret. Most of that stuff is quite visible. You worry about the ones who organize quietly. Here's "God, Family, and Guns", on YouTube.[1] This week, "What gun would Jesus carry?" (Answer: a 1911, the classic Army .45 automatic from 1911.) Besides, Trump doesn't need an SA. [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxFgFKxa3SD1WIZWmBRGEhg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxFgFKxa3SD1WIZWmBRGEhg
- deleted 2y ago
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- Ancapistani 2y ago
  > What the louder militia members and gun nuts are up to is no secret. For that matter, I'd include myself in the latter group. I'm reasonably vocal here - usually in an attempt to simply share my perspective, as it's not of the prevailing position in this community. Sure, "the gun nuts" have a different agenda than the larger community. We're gun nuts because that's important to us. I can't think of anything that I've ever said (or seen said) in that community that should be secret. Lots of things that could be easily taken out of context, sure, and a fair number of things that are just plain inappropriate - but you could say the same for any community. > You worry about the ones who organize quietly. Some of them, absolutely. > Here's "God, Family, and Guns", on YouTube.[1] This week, "What gun would Jesus carry?" (Answer: a 1911, the classic Army .45 automatic from 1911.) I've never heard of that channel - though, granted, I'm not really a YouTube kinda person. It looks like what I'd call "Boomer content". I don't mean that in a negative way exactly; that's the kind of thing I'd expect someone in the gun community in their mid-50s or older to watch. The younger generation (say, 20s-40s) is watching things like "The Fat Electrician".
  - showerst 2y ago
    While there's certainly more overlap than a random group of people, in discussions like these I think even the most anti-gun people recognize that the broader "I like guns because guns are fun" community isn't really the focus in terms of domestic terrorism or crazy race war stuff. Particularly on youtube there's this huge Forgotten Weapons, Garand Thumb, DemolitionRanch etc style sphere that stays relatively apolitical, or at least just mildly right wingy.
gatienboquet 2y ago
ask claude for the script, it will be done in 3 seconds.
- phrotoma 2y ago
  It does seem like a job well suited to simonw's https://github.com/simonw/datasette https://github.com/simonw/datasette
  - gatienboquet 2y ago
    Great tool, could be the solution indeed
indrora 2y ago
To anyone who has the need to export a telegram chat: do it with JSON. Please. Data dredgers will love you because now we don’t have to use Beautiful Soup to reconstruct it
vickyi 2y ago
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feutelsbraut 2y ago
[flagged]

239 points by namenumber 2y ago

[dead]

> This is why this dataset is hard to wrap your head around: there's just sooo much here. It would take a ridiculous amount of time to try to manually read through it all. Also, at a glance at least, it appears that the bulk of it is idle chatter and conspiracy nonsense, presumably with evidence of crimes sprinkled in here or there. Not exactly hard-hitting journalism. He then goes on to speculate that Scot Seddon's disavowal of the January 6th protests was disingenuous, and that his true feelings would be revealed in chat logs after Trump was re-elected. But: > This is much more readable – but still, I don't think I can bring myself to sit down and read 77 pages of these messages right now. And that's just this one export of this one Telegram channel. So the guy complaining about conspiracy theories goes on to invent his own despite having access to potentially corroborative data that he simply can't be bothered to read.

dskrvk 2y ago
The guy is just walking us through the process of analyzing the dataset. He’s not really making any conclusions at this point - it’s like a technical tutorial for journalists.
- lurk2 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - akdor1154 2y ago
    That wasn't my reading. My reading was that it was a natural question for someone to try and find in the dataset, so would serve well as a motivating example. Yes it's politically sensitive, but it's going to be difficult to find motivating examples in this dataset that aren't.
  - lukan 2y ago
    No claim. Just a question that could not be answered yet, because the search tools are lacking. And this was about the search tools, not Scott.
    - lurk2 2y ago
      Actually, you're right, he didn't explicitly state anything about Scot specifically, I just inferred it from his statement that the group chat "presumably" contained evidence of a crime. > Also, at a glance at least, it appears that the bulk of it is idle chatter and conspiracy nonsense, presumably with evidence of crimes sprinkled in here or there. [...] > Ahh, so he's the founder of American Patriot Three Percent, and here's his statement disavowing the violence from January 6, 2021. Looking at the metadata of this PDF, it was created on January 16, 2021. I wonder what Scot thinks about January 6 these days, after Trump was re-elected in 2024. > In all likelihood, I can find out exactly what he thinks, because he probably posted about it to his militia buddies in Telegram, and it's probably in this dataset. The problem is, there's no easy way to quickly filter out messages from him, or even to tell which of these exported Telegram channels he was part of. I think that will be the first problem I solve. While he doesn't come out and explicitly state: "Scot is lying about disavowing violence," I do think it's fairly obvious that this is what he's implying, given everything else he wrote.
      - lukan 2y ago
        "While he doesn't come out and explicitly state: "Scot is lying about disavowing violence," I do think it's fairly obvious that this is what he's implying, given everything else he wrote." I read it as implying, go check for yourself!
      - sepositus 2y ago
        The vibe I got was the whole article was a tutorial on how to consume a dataset for the purpose of breaking a story. An example story that would be great to break is Scot lying. So yeah, it does come off as biased, but maybe that's how journalism is done nowadays.
roenxi 2y ago
> Not exactly hard-hitting journalism. But nonetheless fascinating. There are must be some really good PhD thesii written (to be written?) about how someone is supposed to handle this sort of data dump with modern tooling. It is a non-trivial general problem; we have a lot of really data floating around in public (Panama papers, relatively transparent government info, dumps of less transparent info at wikileaks.org, OSINT of all shapes and sizes). Even if a body reads the whole thing they need some sort of solid mental schema going in or they'll end up in crank territory. Although why he thinks old mate would change his position on the Jan 6 riots is a mystery (and why he cares). Taking a stand against riots is one of those easy-win political options that costs nothing and almost everyone agrees with. Riots are fundamentally ineffective; I doubt anyone serious wants to be associated with rioters. I suppose stranger things happen.
- hsshhshshjk 2y ago
  How about a whole book? > It's come to my attention that this dataset is rather challenging for journalists and researchers to wrap their heads around. I wrote a book, Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations, aimed at teaching journalists and researchers how to analyze datasets just like this.
  - lurk2 2y ago
    I didn't even catch that on my first reading.
- bawolff 2y ago
  > Taking a stand against riots is one of those easy-win political options that costs nothing and almost everyone agrees with. Riots are fundamentally ineffective; I doubt anyone serious wants to be associated with rioters. I suppose stranger things happen. In full fairness "riots" is what its called when the rioters lose. If they win they are usually called something more positive and celebrated by the resulting new regime.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    There is a solid tradition of new regimes killing off the rioters because they are unruly troublemakers. Not a guarantee, but certainly a tendency. Nobody likes rioters when you get down to brass tacks.
cvp 2y ago
> So, I figured I'd write a series of posts publicly exploring this dataset and sharing my findings. > ... > At the end, I'll have a single database of Telegram messages from the whole dataset. I'll be able to query it to, for example, show me all messages from Scot Seddon sorted chronologically. This will make it simple to see what he was saying in the lead-up to January 6, immediately after January 6, and then what he's saying about Trump these days, after he was re-elected. There are more parts to come in this series, which is very clearly stated in the post.
- lurk2 2y ago
  If I claim to have evidence that you committed a crime, and announce that I will post the evidence later, should my claims be taken seriously, or dismissed? Even if he's right (and I'm not saying he isn't), this kind of behavior is inexcusable (though completely expected) coming from a guy who calls himself a journalist.
bawolff 2y ago
> > This is much more readable – but still, I don't think I can bring myself to sit down and read 77 pages of these messages right now. And that's just this one export of this one Telegram channel. 77 pages isn't that much in the scheme of thing. A court case having 77 pages of evidence would be entirely normal.
- pc86 2y ago
  And let's be honest 77 pages of telegram chats would probably take 15 or 20 minutes to read. It's not exactly Proust.
  - neom 2y ago
    Not that it's a great method but just for fun I gave a large chunk of it to an LLM to process and then asked it for the 20 most disturbing or nefarious things in the chats and it was incredibly boring. Most interesting thing I learned from the files is how many gun toting americans also drive dodge chargers.
    - pc86 2y ago
      I would have expected nice pickup trucks or any TRD Pro trim Toyota. I'd be curious if the LLM's own self-censorship would prevent it from reporting truly disturbing things. Maybe add one legitimately bad thing into the middle of a chat and see if it gets reported.
      - neom 2y ago
        I'm fairly decent a prompt engineering I think, told it was for my art project of a creative writing class and I'd hidden 20 disturbing and nefarious things in the text (made sure to inject a fake murder into the text) - fake murder then a bunch of airsoft stuff, some psychological manipulation, and it oddly surfaced...some fb cookies, heh. 2mill tokens x3 runs
        Koffiepoeder 2y ago
WatchDog 2y ago
The author of the blog post, Micah Lee, appears to be one of the directors of Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets)[0]. DDoSecrets appears to be an anarchist/communist affiliated activist group. Basically you've got two groups from extreme sides of the political spectrum fighting each other, the Guy Fawkes LARPers upset about Jan 6 of all things, and the seal team 6 LARPers upset about "stolen" elections and ivermectin. [0]: https://ddosecrets.com/about https://ddosecrets.com/about

ferguess_k 2y ago

TBH I wouldn't be surprised if these organizations are infested with FBI agents.

wildzzz 2y ago
Even the small group that tried to kidnap Whitmer had a suspected 12 informants and agents (3 confirmed informants, 2 agents) in the group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_plot#FBI_informants_and_agents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_pl...
- thinkingemote 2y ago
  It's also worth pointing out that this pattern is kind of common. As here, these agents are often at the very top. Almost all Organisations of Interest will be compromised at the leadership level. It's something most grass roots activists don't feel intuitively at all. They look for spies among their own level but it's almost always going to be the organisers, the helpers, the ones with the van, the one that can print your posters, the one with a bit of spare cash, the dude who can set up your server and the friendly friend with time to help you personally that are the spies. Logically it makes sense for a spy to be placed as high as possible to get more information, and yet activists look for spies among the rank and file. They look for odd people to label as the spy. They expel the outsider. They suspect the ones that don't fit in. But the spy is going to be a well adjusted normal insider that they already trust, almost always! I find it so interesting. It happens again and again. It's probably the same pattern for any group that attracts any government attention.
  - noneeeed 2y ago
    As I mentioned in another comment, one of the most amazing examples of this was the British Army/MI5 mole inside the IRA, Freddie Scappaticci, codenamed Steaknife. He was a leading member of the IRA's internal security team. It really feels counterintuitive that someone who has got to the top would be the one to turn, but it also makes sense that they would be the one's targetted.

mannyv 2y ago

With a big dump like this, the Disney one, Clinton's emails, efc - what would you want to be able to do?

DANmode 2y ago
Search, in a browser? Feed it to a local model? If so: Wikileaks made/makes(?) all of their stuff easily browseable, "her emails" included.
- mannyv 2y ago
  You can search, but what do you search for if you don't know what's there?
  - lukan 2y ago
    "Evil plans of new world order" obviously.. It seems you want a AI to analyze the data in general? Otherwise you will have to do some work and read a little bit .. and then investigate to see if there is more. That is where the search tools are useful. Like in the example, finding out if that Scott guy changed his opinion on the 6. of january after Trump became president. (To see if the original statement was a lie. Not possible with ease so far) People will speak in code, if they are planning crimes. Only some idiots speak openly of violent revolution in public messengers.
  - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    If you don't know what's there you just start from the top I suppose. That's what happened with the Snowden leaks, they were picked apart over the span of months if not years by journalists, publishing what they found was interesting.
    - mannyv 2y ago
      I suppose when you have a large corpus you start with as many browse points as you can. So maybe a list of the top senders, top recipients, recipient graphs. I'd think by day would be next. Browse subjects by day, and word clouds for each message thread? The. Try to isolate topics discussed each day, then link the topics across days. You should be able to click in and see the thread/messages/etc. This is, at some level, how legal discovery stuff works from what I understand.

getlawgdon 2y ago

In a dump like this, why would anyone truat that any given part of it is authentic? I could tell some great lies by embedding disinformation in a disseminated data dump like this.

somenameforme 2y ago
Skimming a fair chunk of it by hand (and some others have run it through LLMs) it seems extremely mundane. I also find the publisher's claims that he "[just can't] bring [him]self to sit down and read 77 pages of these messages right now" implausible. He's self promoting like crazy, is/was a professional reporter, and 77 pages of sparsely spaced telegram chats is like 30 minutes of reading. If there was some big story awaiting in those 77 pages (or the entire leak for that matter) he'd, with 100% certainty, want to be the one breaking it. So it's most likely just going to be an insight into a different culture/worldview, like reading e.g. /r/anarchism. In many ways this is also the same with the Clinton leaks. Unless one was just horrifically naive of how politics works, there was nothing particularly exceptional in it. The really wild stuff came from interpreting messages as having coded meanings.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  77 pages of messages sounds like it's only a small percentage of communication in that group. I can imagine (also based on other comments about organizations like this being infiltrated by law enforcement) their communication networks are a lot more involved than Telegram chats or other "honeypotable" systems. Snowden revealed (or confirmed our suspicions that) the NSA has backdoor access to all major American based social media / communications, and the media broke at least twice about a major 'encrypted' chat / secure phone provider being compromised causing hundreds if not thousands of arrests worldwide. (note: arrests, because whether the chats were recorded legally and are admissable to court is a whole different matter)
- sangnoir 2y ago
  > I also find the publisher's claims that he "[just can't] bring [him]self to sit down and read 77 pages of these messages right now" implausible. Read back a few sentences for the context - they aren't willing to ready 77 pages just to seek/isolate messages from one individual around a specific topic. I would expect a journalist to do this repeatedly for multiple individuals, so it makes sense to parse the data and make it queryable without having to read through hundreds/thousands of telegrams just to capture a few dozen

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jfjrrirjrjrrjj 2y ago

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diggan 2y ago
The source is https://ddosecrets.com/article/paramilitary-leaks https://ddosecrets.com/article/paramilitary-leaks which states > Over 200 gigabytes of chat logs and recordings from paramilitary groups and militias including American Patriots Three Percent (APIII) and the Oath Keepers So no, neither of those groups are anti-fascists (seemingly the opposite actually) or "far-left", and the resulting documentation is only from the groups the individual successfully infiltrated. Besides, how many bigger groups of militarized anti-fascist groups exists today in the US? I'm not from there, so don't know the situation, but from the outside it seems like mostly people on the right are the ones running the militias over there.
- lurk2 2y ago
  > how many bigger groups of militarized anti-fascist groups exists today in the US? They tend to run largely independent scenes from city to city. You'll usually have anywhere from one to a dozen people acting as the core organizers of a given group. The groups range in size from around a dozen people to upwards of four hundred, depending on the city. Some cities might also have multiple groups active at a given time. I don't know what the scenes look like now but around 2018 I can remember at least two independent groups operating out of Portland, for example. These groups are usually no more than a phone tree of people they can mobilize for protests. Organizers may also be in contact with scenes from other cities; it's not uncommon for demonstrators to be bussed in to a protest from another city or state. It's quite rare for these groups to be truly "militarized." They often form violent mobs, but they rarely have any hierarchical structure beyond "leadership" (the organizers) and they don't generally make use of firearms. This has been changing in recent years; there have been a number of high-profile shootings involving Antifa-affiliated shooters.
  - diggan 2y ago
    > It's quite rare for these groups to be truly "militarized." They often form violent mobs, but they rarely have any hierarchical structure beyond "leadership" (the organizers) and they don't generally make use of firearms. This has been changing in recent years; there have been a number of high-profile shootings involving Antifa-affiliated shooters. Quite a long answer overall that boils down to "No, they don't exist" :) Would make sense if our friends in the US would also arm themselves, similar to militias on the right, but I wonder why that isn't the case? Even the non-extremists seems to have (to me) extremist opinions about guns, so I guess I'm kind of surprised only the far-right side got militarized compared to the left. I guess it gets a lot easier when you have more friends in the right (no pun intended) places.

Animats 2y ago

What the louder militia members and gun nuts are up to is no secret. Most of that stuff is quite visible. You worry about the ones who organize quietly. Here's "God, Family, and Guns", on YouTube.[1] This week, "What gun would Jesus carry?" (Answer: a 1911, the classic Army .45 automatic from 1911.) Besides, Trump doesn't need an SA. [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxFgFKxa3SD1WIZWmBRGEhg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxFgFKxa3SD1WIZWmBRGEhg

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Ancapistani 2y ago
> What the louder militia members and gun nuts are up to is no secret. For that matter, I'd include myself in the latter group. I'm reasonably vocal here - usually in an attempt to simply share my perspective, as it's not of the prevailing position in this community. Sure, "the gun nuts" have a different agenda than the larger community. We're gun nuts because that's important to us. I can't think of anything that I've ever said (or seen said) in that community that should be secret. Lots of things that could be easily taken out of context, sure, and a fair number of things that are just plain inappropriate - but you could say the same for any community. > You worry about the ones who organize quietly. Some of them, absolutely. > Here's "God, Family, and Guns", on YouTube.[1] This week, "What gun would Jesus carry?" (Answer: a 1911, the classic Army .45 automatic from 1911.) I've never heard of that channel - though, granted, I'm not really a YouTube kinda person. It looks like what I'd call "Boomer content". I don't mean that in a negative way exactly; that's the kind of thing I'd expect someone in the gun community in their mid-50s or older to watch. The younger generation (say, 20s-40s) is watching things like "The Fat Electrician".
- showerst 2y ago
  While there's certainly more overlap than a random group of people, in discussions like these I think even the most anti-gun people recognize that the broader "I like guns because guns are fun" community isn't really the focus in terms of domestic terrorism or crazy race war stuff. Particularly on youtube there's this huge Forgotten Weapons, Garand Thumb, DemolitionRanch etc style sphere that stays relatively apolitical, or at least just mildly right wingy.

gatienboquet 2y ago

ask claude for the script, it will be done in 3 seconds.

phrotoma 2y ago
It does seem like a job well suited to simonw's https://github.com/simonw/datasette https://github.com/simonw/datasette
- gatienboquet 2y ago
  Great tool, could be the solution indeed

indrora 2y ago

To anyone who has the need to export a telegram chat: do it with JSON. Please. Data dredgers will love you because now we don’t have to use Beautiful Soup to reconstruct it

vickyi 2y ago

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feutelsbraut 2y ago

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