10 ms·

Yanukovych leaks

321 points by mxfh 13y ago

nailer 13y ago
They could crowdsource finding interesting stuff - eg, the Guardian had an app where members of the public were show random expense reports from politicians, and could flag unusual/odd expenses.
- danohuiginn 13y ago
  That's definitely the plan. We've been working flat out on this for the past few days, and the immediate priority is getting the documents preserved. [many of them were waterlogged, and have to be separated and dried in the presidential sauna] But crowdsourcing is certainly going to happen
  - sp332 13y ago
    Could you get some pics of drying the docs in the sauna? That would be amazing!
    - danohuiginn 13y ago
      here are some in a speedboat: https://twitter.com/kgorchinskaya/statuses/437359849828261888 https://twitter.com/kgorchinskaya/statuses/43735984982826188... There's at least one photo from the sauna somewhere online, but I can't remember where
    - 650REDHAIR 13y ago
      Here's a collage I found with a sauna picture included. https://twitter.com/gijn/status/439047949042319360 https://twitter.com/gijn/status/439047949042319360 Edit Whoops! Found a bigger sauna picture right after this posted! https://twitter.com/gijn/status/439022212105134080 https://twitter.com/gijn/status/439022212105134080
  - brador 13y ago
    What if some of the documents contain private information of non-involved individuals? Any steps being taken to protect their details?
    - danohuiginn 13y ago
      Good question -- this is definitely an issue we need to wrestle with. For now, the vast bulk of the documents going up are business papers involving Yanukovich's companies and the management of his estates. I think those are fair game. But we'll get into murkier areas as time goes on. For now, if you see something that you think shouldn't be public, drop an email to yanukovychleaks@gmail.com and we'll look into it.
      - nyrina 13y ago
        Isn't that a bit too late at that point in time? Once something has been on the internet...
    - ctdonath 13y ago
      If nothing else, this is a reminder that any "private" information you reveal to the state may or may not remain private. Hence the importance of "The right of the people to be secure in their ... papers ..., against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." That includes bureaucratic compulsion under penalty. Maybe this will persuade Ukrainians to demand real privacy protections (as in: the government can't have private info).
      - tripzilch 13y ago
        ... you did not just quote the US Constitution at a Ukrainian.
        ctdonath 13y ago
        Works pretty well for us when followed. Just making a suggestion, since constitutional changes seem in the works for Ukraine.
danso 13y ago
I'm not ignorant of the needs and concerns of self-promotion in order to build a popular campaign...but I hope they have a technical advisor who will, at some point, inform them about the technique of OCR and how a large hashtag-watermark can obstruct such a technique. Also, minor detail, but the images should also be rotated to their proper orientation. Crowdsourcing data collection has to be as frictionless as possible, and this is an easy fix. Depending on how many actual documents there are (i.e. how many pages are in those 200 folders), it might be worth it to go the route of ProPublica's "Free the Files" project, in which they built a mini-app that let people voluntarily transcribe the important fields in each document: https://www.propublica.org/series/free-the-files https://www.propublica.org/series/free-the-files Their Al Shaw wrote a piece about designing for efficient crowd-sourcing: http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/casino-driven-design http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/casino-driven-design They even open-sourced the Rails plugin for it: http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/transcribable-free-the-files-to-go http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/transcribable-free-the-...
- danohuiginn 13y ago
  > the images should also be rotated to their proper orientation there's a rotate button when you click through to the detail page. We're tracking where images get rotated to, and setting the orientation according to that. It's still a bit buggy, but we're getting there > the technique of OCR and how a large hashtag-watermark can obstruct such a technique We're running OCR over non-watermarked versions. We're hoping to have a search function up later today Thanks for the links -- we'll look at them, and see what we can use
  - Alekanekelo 13y ago
    > there's a rotate button when you click through to the detail page. When rotating some of the images (for example Img 999) it seems to cut the edges of the image off and clicking to zoom doesn't help.
danohuiginn 13y ago
One of the participants here. It's been a crazy few days. We have documents drying in the former president's sauna, prosecutors waiting for each file to be scanned before confiscating it, and an incredible group of journalists working night and day to save as many documents as possible. A few articles with more background: http://gijn.org/2014/02/25/yanukovychleaks-org-how-ukraine-journalists-are-making-history/ http://gijn.org/2014/02/25/yanukovychleaks-org-how-ukraine-j... http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/ukrainian-journalists-launch-yanukovychleaks/ http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/ukrainian-journa... http://gijn.org/2014/02/27/yanukovychleaks-update-the-project-is-becoming-bigger/ http://gijn.org/2014/02/27/yanukovychleaks-update-the-projec...
- moneyries 13y ago
  hey there - i'm a reporter w/ @mashable, wondering if you might be free for to do a quick Q&A? sorry to barge in on the thread but this is super interesting to me personally. - @moneyries / moneyries at gmail.
  - Sprint 13y ago
    Please let them do their important real work instead of your pseudo-journalism about social media.
    - leobelle 13y ago
      Holy cow Sprint, that is a really vicious reply, and totally unwarranted.
      - richthegeek 13y ago
        Slightly warranted. It seems like there is some time-pressure (prosecutors confiscating files after scanning) that means any time taken away from archiving all this could lead to some things being hidden from public view if the prosecution suddenly decides to confiscate all the files. It wasn't phrased particularly nicely, but it's got some reasoning behind it I think?
chatman 13y ago
This doesn't belong here at Hacker News.
- orf 13y ago
  Mind explaining why?
- joshmlewis 13y ago
  Why not? Edit: Think hard about your answer because to me it seems like this is a beautiful example of the power of technology outside of the norm here in the states.
- colinramsay 13y ago
  http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link."
- jnbiche 13y ago
  Strongly disagree. This is the epitome of the hacker mentality. Just because it's not being applied toward building a company doesn't mean it's not worthy of discussion.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  Would you like to instead: talk about how to pivot yanukovychleaks.org to a billion dollar startup idea. Critique their choice of web framework. Talk about how to optimize bandwidth usage. Critique other design choices, usage/non-usage of CSS Discuss SEO strategies? Other?
  - ansimionescu 13y ago
    I wish there were more JavaScript posts. Did you know you can do functional programming with it?! /s
jmnicolas 13y ago
This is in Russian (or Ukrainian) ... are the HN readers supposed to read fluently Cyrillic ?
- krenoten 13y ago
  I can fluently read Cyrillic. I learned it as a child in a few minutes for fun. It's fluently reading any actual language written in Cyrillic that gets me :P
- rocky1138 13y ago
  It is English, as well. Look at the right-hand side of the screen.
  - DominoTree 13y ago
    I'm pretty sure he meant the actual documents and not the header text.
- Cthulhu_ 13y ago
  > assuming all of HN only knows english
  - jmnicolas 13y ago
    You know what, I'm French ... but when I come on HN I expect to do my reading in English unless otherwise specified in the title of the thread.
    - lotsofmangos 13y ago
      You expect to read freshly dried and scanned Ukrainian government documents in English?
      - jmnicolas 13y ago
        I expect not to have content that is unreadable by probably 90% of HN readers ...
rocky1138 13y ago
This should really be served with https.
- krenoten 13y ago
  Why? Any snooper still sees a DNS lookup for this domain followed by a connection to it. This is not such a dynamic site - it's fairly obvious what you will be accessing.
  - bdamm 13y ago
    A site like this can have interesting corners not easily found. The knowledge that you know about such corners could itself be used against you. That's a good reason to serve it up as https.
    - krenoten 13y ago
      That's a good point. You've convinced me :)
lifeisstillgood 13y ago
This is one of those Walls coming down moments for me. I have banged on about how governments and states are losing their privacy as much as individuals - and whilst this is happening after a political crisis, it is increidble to see a few determined hackers and some simple off the shelf equipment is throwing open the doors to a hidden state. Truly eye-opening, and something we should look for in our nice safe democracies. PS Plus I know a few Ukrainians and hope that this can get resolved with no further bloodshed.
rogerthis 13y ago
I'll take the images to the priest of the catholic ukranian parish I attend...
ChuckMcM 13y ago
I think this is awesome, I worry about it triggering a Russian response if there is something in there which ties back to the Putin administration. What I really like is way in which Ukraine is going about this, unlike the Mideast (Egypt comes to mind), where it seems the only things the people who took over cared about was exacting retribution on the former government, rather than having "Make a stable and just government" as their first priority, and "Investigate and punish any crimes that may have occurred" as their second priority.
- mladenkovacevic 13y ago
  The first thing this new "government" did before doing anything else was repeal a law that allows regional rights to minority languages (Russian included) and demanded that the International Criminal Court charge the democratically elected Yanukovich with crimes against humanity. They are only now trying to name an interim government. As far as how stable this government will be that is left to be seen, but if the US was willing to invest some resources in supporting the revolution and several of the candidates being named this week, as the assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland seems to suggest in this intimate conversation (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957), perhaps they'll be willing to bail out Ukraine's economy?

321 points by mxfh 13y ago

They could crowdsource finding interesting stuff - eg, the Guardian had an app where members of the public were show random expense reports from politicians, and could flag unusual/odd expenses.

danohuiginn 13y ago
That's definitely the plan. We've been working flat out on this for the past few days, and the immediate priority is getting the documents preserved. [many of them were waterlogged, and have to be separated and dried in the presidential sauna] But crowdsourcing is certainly going to happen
- sp332 13y ago
  Could you get some pics of drying the docs in the sauna? That would be amazing!
  - danohuiginn 13y ago
    here are some in a speedboat: https://twitter.com/kgorchinskaya/statuses/437359849828261888 https://twitter.com/kgorchinskaya/statuses/43735984982826188... There's at least one photo from the sauna somewhere online, but I can't remember where
  - 650REDHAIR 13y ago
    Here's a collage I found with a sauna picture included. https://twitter.com/gijn/status/439047949042319360 https://twitter.com/gijn/status/439047949042319360 Edit Whoops! Found a bigger sauna picture right after this posted! https://twitter.com/gijn/status/439022212105134080 https://twitter.com/gijn/status/439022212105134080
- brador 13y ago
  What if some of the documents contain private information of non-involved individuals? Any steps being taken to protect their details?
  - danohuiginn 13y ago
    Good question -- this is definitely an issue we need to wrestle with. For now, the vast bulk of the documents going up are business papers involving Yanukovich's companies and the management of his estates. I think those are fair game. But we'll get into murkier areas as time goes on. For now, if you see something that you think shouldn't be public, drop an email to yanukovychleaks@gmail.com and we'll look into it.
    - nyrina 13y ago
      Isn't that a bit too late at that point in time? Once something has been on the internet...
  - ctdonath 13y ago
    If nothing else, this is a reminder that any "private" information you reveal to the state may or may not remain private. Hence the importance of "The right of the people to be secure in their ... papers ..., against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." That includes bureaucratic compulsion under penalty. Maybe this will persuade Ukrainians to demand real privacy protections (as in: the government can't have private info).
    - tripzilch 13y ago
      ... you did not just quote the US Constitution at a Ukrainian.
      - ctdonath 13y ago
        Works pretty well for us when followed. Just making a suggestion, since constitutional changes seem in the works for Ukraine.

danso 13y ago

I'm not ignorant of the needs and concerns of self-promotion in order to build a popular campaign...but I hope they have a technical advisor who will, at some point, inform them about the technique of OCR and how a large hashtag-watermark can obstruct such a technique. Also, minor detail, but the images should also be rotated to their proper orientation. Crowdsourcing data collection has to be as frictionless as possible, and this is an easy fix. Depending on how many actual documents there are (i.e. how many pages are in those 200 folders), it might be worth it to go the route of ProPublica's "Free the Files" project, in which they built a mini-app that let people voluntarily transcribe the important fields in each document: https://www.propublica.org/series/free-the-files https://www.propublica.org/series/free-the-files Their Al Shaw wrote a piece about designing for efficient crowd-sourcing: http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/casino-driven-design http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/casino-driven-design They even open-sourced the Rails plugin for it: http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/transcribable-free-the-files-to-go http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/transcribable-free-the-...

danohuiginn 13y ago
> the images should also be rotated to their proper orientation there's a rotate button when you click through to the detail page. We're tracking where images get rotated to, and setting the orientation according to that. It's still a bit buggy, but we're getting there > the technique of OCR and how a large hashtag-watermark can obstruct such a technique We're running OCR over non-watermarked versions. We're hoping to have a search function up later today Thanks for the links -- we'll look at them, and see what we can use
- Alekanekelo 13y ago
  > there's a rotate button when you click through to the detail page. When rotating some of the images (for example Img 999) it seems to cut the edges of the image off and clicking to zoom doesn't help.

danohuiginn 13y ago

One of the participants here. It's been a crazy few days. We have documents drying in the former president's sauna, prosecutors waiting for each file to be scanned before confiscating it, and an incredible group of journalists working night and day to save as many documents as possible. A few articles with more background: http://gijn.org/2014/02/25/yanukovychleaks-org-how-ukraine-journalists-are-making-history/ http://gijn.org/2014/02/25/yanukovychleaks-org-how-ukraine-j... http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/ukrainian-journalists-launch-yanukovychleaks/ http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/ukrainian-journa... http://gijn.org/2014/02/27/yanukovychleaks-update-the-project-is-becoming-bigger/ http://gijn.org/2014/02/27/yanukovychleaks-update-the-projec...

moneyries 13y ago
hey there - i'm a reporter w/ @mashable, wondering if you might be free for to do a quick Q&A? sorry to barge in on the thread but this is super interesting to me personally. - @moneyries / moneyries at gmail.
- Sprint 13y ago
  Please let them do their important real work instead of your pseudo-journalism about social media.
  - leobelle 13y ago
    Holy cow Sprint, that is a really vicious reply, and totally unwarranted.
    - richthegeek 13y ago
      Slightly warranted. It seems like there is some time-pressure (prosecutors confiscating files after scanning) that means any time taken away from archiving all this could lead to some things being hidden from public view if the prosecution suddenly decides to confiscate all the files. It wasn't phrased particularly nicely, but it's got some reasoning behind it I think?

chatman 13y ago

This doesn't belong here at Hacker News.

orf 13y ago
Mind explaining why?
joshmlewis 13y ago
Why not? Edit: Think hard about your answer because to me it seems like this is a beautiful example of the power of technology outside of the norm here in the states.
colinramsay 13y ago
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link."
jnbiche 13y ago
Strongly disagree. This is the epitome of the hacker mentality. Just because it's not being applied toward building a company doesn't mean it's not worthy of discussion.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
Would you like to instead: talk about how to pivot yanukovychleaks.org to a billion dollar startup idea. Critique their choice of web framework. Talk about how to optimize bandwidth usage. Critique other design choices, usage/non-usage of CSS Discuss SEO strategies? Other?
- ansimionescu 13y ago
  I wish there were more JavaScript posts. Did you know you can do functional programming with it?! /s

jmnicolas 13y ago

This is in Russian (or Ukrainian) ... are the HN readers supposed to read fluently Cyrillic ?

krenoten 13y ago
I can fluently read Cyrillic. I learned it as a child in a few minutes for fun. It's fluently reading any actual language written in Cyrillic that gets me :P
rocky1138 13y ago
It is English, as well. Look at the right-hand side of the screen.
- DominoTree 13y ago
  I'm pretty sure he meant the actual documents and not the header text.
Cthulhu_ 13y ago
> assuming all of HN only knows english
- jmnicolas 13y ago
  You know what, I'm French ... but when I come on HN I expect to do my reading in English unless otherwise specified in the title of the thread.
  - lotsofmangos 13y ago
    You expect to read freshly dried and scanned Ukrainian government documents in English?
    - jmnicolas 13y ago
      I expect not to have content that is unreadable by probably 90% of HN readers ...

rocky1138 13y ago

This should really be served with https.

krenoten 13y ago
Why? Any snooper still sees a DNS lookup for this domain followed by a connection to it. This is not such a dynamic site - it's fairly obvious what you will be accessing.
- bdamm 13y ago
  A site like this can have interesting corners not easily found. The knowledge that you know about such corners could itself be used against you. That's a good reason to serve it up as https.
  - krenoten 13y ago
    That's a good point. You've convinced me :)

lifeisstillgood 13y ago

This is one of those Walls coming down moments for me. I have banged on about how governments and states are losing their privacy as much as individuals - and whilst this is happening after a political crisis, it is increidble to see a few determined hackers and some simple off the shelf equipment is throwing open the doors to a hidden state. Truly eye-opening, and something we should look for in our nice safe democracies. PS Plus I know a few Ukrainians and hope that this can get resolved with no further bloodshed.

rogerthis 13y ago

I'll take the images to the priest of the catholic ukranian parish I attend...

ChuckMcM 13y ago

I think this is awesome, I worry about it triggering a Russian response if there is something in there which ties back to the Putin administration. What I really like is way in which Ukraine is going about this, unlike the Mideast (Egypt comes to mind), where it seems the only things the people who took over cared about was exacting retribution on the former government, rather than having "Make a stable and just government" as their first priority, and "Investigate and punish any crimes that may have occurred" as their second priority.

mladenkovacevic 13y ago
The first thing this new "government" did before doing anything else was repeal a law that allows regional rights to minority languages (Russian included) and demanded that the International Criminal Court charge the democratically elected Yanukovich with crimes against humanity. They are only now trying to name an interim government. As far as how stable this government will be that is left to be seen, but if the US was willing to invest some resources in supporting the revolution and several of the candidates being named this week, as the assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland seems to suggest in this intimate conversation (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957), perhaps they'll be willing to bail out Ukraine's economy?