7 ms·

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 sca

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?
      - RossM 13y ago
        The BBC reported on this last night - saying something along the lines of there being a 72 hour recovery window (not sure if that means from being thrown into the lake or from being surfaced). Quite a good report actually, they showed the drying and scanning. Apparently some documents were burned before being thrown into the lake also. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26361455 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26361455
    - d23 13y ago
      Welcome to HN, where the comments are bullshit and politeness doesn't matter.
    - Sprint 13y ago
      It is harsh but I stand by it. Take a look at mashable.com and maybe you will understand my aggression.
      - untog 13y ago
        Mashable reports a wide variety of stuff these days, like this current top story: http://mashable.com/2014/02/27/russia-protect-ukraine-yanukovych/ http://mashable.com/2014/02/27/russia-protect-ukraine-yanuko...
        Sprint 13y ago
        Of course! Anything that brings visitors who you can serve ads to is good content. Re-wording AP releases or stories from news websites does not take much time.
        moneyries 13y ago
        It's okay. News websites are easy to knock. Truth is we have spent months following this story and have a reporter on the ground in Kyiv. This is a sampling: http://mashable.com/category/ukraine-protests/ http://mashable.com/category/ukraine-protests/. More here: https://www.google.com/search?q=ukraine+site%3Amashable.com&oq=ukraine+site%3Amashable.com&aqs=chrome..69i57.2719j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=119&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=ukraine+site%3Amashable.com&....
      - davidrudder 13y ago
        The article on Al Jazeera's imprisoned reporters was a really good read. I guess I should thank you for sending me there.
        Sprint 13y ago
        You mean the re-worded http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/02/al-jazeera-calls-global-support-staff-201422617832540220.html http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/02/al-jazeera-... ? You are welcome for me sending you to Al Jazeera.
  - malandrew 13y ago
    So long as the journalist puts adds information on how to volunteer and help, press can be useful.
- nicholassmith 13y ago
  There's an email address listed on their profile, might be worth trying that.
- JetSpiegel 13y ago
  Where's you public key?
  - imjared 13y ago
    Mashable writer with a public key? I think you are confusing them with a real news organization, not the site whose headlines currently include: "11 Funky Computer Mice That Really Click" and "25 Pieces of Food Jewelry Cute Enough to Eat"
    - ceejayoz 13y ago
      http://mashable.com/category/mashable-spotlight/ http://mashable.com/category/mashable-spotlight/
      - JetSpiegel 13y ago
        Top Story: The Justin Biebers of Minecraft Are Rewriting the Marketing Playbook Just...
krenoten 13y ago
I hope you are deliberately lying about where this is still going on, otherwise why are you jeopardizing this potentially important operation by bragging about where you're conducting it? You are only inviting trouble from the thugs. Would the downvoter care to come out of their dark corner and explain why I am wrong?
- maaarghk 13y ago
  Not the downvoter and don't think it's worth a downvote but don't think the comment said anything not mentioned in (at least) the NY times article.
  - devconsole 13y ago
    One other consideration: by posting their comment, they've leaked their ip address, which is a proxy for their location.
- willvarfar 13y ago
  I've seen it on the BBC news. The place is swarming with activists and reporters. Its definitely not being done in secret.
  - krenoten 13y ago
    I was unaware of the BBC (or any) major media coverage of this. It still worries me that this is going the route of "everybody look at this" to keep it secure. It does take a certain amount of trust among participants to go the route of "ok guys, we are going to handle these in a secret place until the job's done and we can distribute all at once," but the chosen route paints a very large bullseye on the operation. I would imagine that it would not be hard for the police to justify a raid to reclaim classified documents, but maybe someone more familiar with the situation than myself could explain why this is less likely than my paranoid mind tells me?
    - nullymcnull 13y ago
gesman 13y ago
For the ones who have hard time remembering how to spell it: http://c.gg/yl http://c.gg/yl
- kwamenum86 13y ago
  Expert troll?
- davidrudder 13y ago
  I took the admittedly stupid approach of just clicking the link, while at work, with my office door open. As it turns out, it's on the up-and-up, all good, works as expected.
  - gesman 13y ago
    No danger here :) Just making things easier to use.
kmfrk 13y ago
It looks like the photos are upside-down, when you go to a specific page and click to zoom in. Didn't know where else to report it.
- sp332 13y ago
  The detail page has a "Rotate" button, down next to "Next" and "Previous".
spoiledtechie 13y ago
Whats the site powered by? Did you just throw it together or is it a CMS?
- pudo 13y ago
  Django, MySQL, S3+CloudFront, Tesseract and lots of duct tape...
donohoe 13y ago
You should look at DocumentCloud and see if it would be helpful for hosting and managing the documents you're finding. http://www.documentcloud.org/home http://www.documentcloud.org/home https://github.com/documentcloud https://github.com/documentcloud It might be ideal for your needs. The project uses Tesseract‘s OCR to read documents and OpenCalais to pull data from them, including key people, places, and dates.
- jdimov 13y ago
  I doubt Tesseract will do well with handwritten Ukrainian... and I am positive OpenCalais won't detect anything in that language.
- pudo 13y ago
  The project initially used DocumentCloud, but I guess that's built for scenarios which are a little less horrible than single-page JPEGs coming in via FTP. Tesseract has been working beautifully, we've got the first 1500 documents sent through it. Unfortunately, we don't know the language of each document (trying to get up some crowdsourcing for that), so each gets sent through three times (eng, rus, ukr). Finally, all versions are indexed in ElasticSearch. If anyone has a neater way of doing this (e.g. a good, Python-based language detector), please shout!
thorntonbf 13y ago
Corrupt governments' greatest nightmare is transparency. It's amazing that these documents were discarded so carelessly. That alone probably says a lot about the competency of the Yanukovych government at large. Good luck and Godspeed! Here's hoping that some of the information found here can be used as evidence and will speed the transition to a better government. Stay safe out there.
- rdtsc 13y ago
  > It's amazing that these documents were discarded so carelessly. If there are criminals (and there are) at least let's hope they are incompetent and stupid they can be found and caught easily. Or that those chasing them a fast enough for the criminals to make mistakes on their way out. The former East German government in its final days tried to shred documents, and it did. It left mountains of single strip shredded documents. Well, it turns out it is possible to painstakingly reconstruct those. There is software that can help as well. http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/puzzling-together-the-past-new-computer-program-to-reassemble-shredded-stasi-files-a-482136.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/puzzling-togethe... They should have burt them, then mixed the ash with water and dumped it in a landfill, but, well glad there were not competent enough or these enacting the change were coming fast enough on their heels.
- rjzzleep 13y ago
  name one government that is not corrupt edit: funny i'd like to know what the down vote is about. it's not a snarky response i'm being full serious here right now. i don't know a single one. that's not how governments operate
  - avn2109 13y ago
    In general I'm with you on this one, but maybe the Nordic states? Or maybe extremely small states a la Lichtenstein, where the complexity and amounts of money involved in governance are so low that corruption hardly pays off at all.
mpyne 13y ago
I wish you guys all the best. :) I've been arguing with a friend of mine the past few days who's convinced all of this is just some kind of CIA operation to get back at Putin for reasons. Or something. Also that people should never be able to protest about their "democratically-elected government".
- mladenkovacevic 13y ago
  The very idea that CIA would somehow be involved in a violent and coordinated coup for the purposes of advancing its geopolitical interests.... Somebody get your friend a tinfoil hat amiright or amiright! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_regime_change_actions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_re...
  - mpyne 13y ago
    Just like a model of the solar system of epicycles-within-epicycles that accurately predicts the location of Jupiter a few times must be the explanation for all further observations of Jupiter, right?
shirman 13y ago
Слава Украине! И привет из Москвы ;)

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?
    - RossM 13y ago
      The BBC reported on this last night - saying something along the lines of there being a 72 hour recovery window (not sure if that means from being thrown into the lake or from being surfaced). Quite a good report actually, they showed the drying and scanning. Apparently some documents were burned before being thrown into the lake also. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26361455 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26361455
  - d23 13y ago
    Welcome to HN, where the comments are bullshit and politeness doesn't matter.
  - Sprint 13y ago
    It is harsh but I stand by it. Take a look at mashable.com and maybe you will understand my aggression.
    - untog 13y ago
      Mashable reports a wide variety of stuff these days, like this current top story: http://mashable.com/2014/02/27/russia-protect-ukraine-yanukovych/ http://mashable.com/2014/02/27/russia-protect-ukraine-yanuko...
      - Sprint 13y ago
        Of course! Anything that brings visitors who you can serve ads to is good content. Re-wording AP releases or stories from news websites does not take much time.
        moneyries 13y ago
        It's okay. News websites are easy to knock. Truth is we have spent months following this story and have a reporter on the ground in Kyiv. This is a sampling: http://mashable.com/category/ukraine-protests/ http://mashable.com/category/ukraine-protests/. More here: https://www.google.com/search?q=ukraine+site%3Amashable.com&oq=ukraine+site%3Amashable.com&aqs=chrome..69i57.2719j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=119&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=ukraine+site%3Amashable.com&....
    - davidrudder 13y ago
      The article on Al Jazeera's imprisoned reporters was a really good read. I guess I should thank you for sending me there.
      - Sprint 13y ago
        You mean the re-worded http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/02/al-jazeera-calls-global-support-staff-201422617832540220.html http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/02/al-jazeera-... ? You are welcome for me sending you to Al Jazeera.
- malandrew 13y ago
  So long as the journalist puts adds information on how to volunteer and help, press can be useful.
nicholassmith 13y ago
There's an email address listed on their profile, might be worth trying that.
JetSpiegel 13y ago
Where's you public key?
- imjared 13y ago
  Mashable writer with a public key? I think you are confusing them with a real news organization, not the site whose headlines currently include: "11 Funky Computer Mice That Really Click" and "25 Pieces of Food Jewelry Cute Enough to Eat"
  - ceejayoz 13y ago
    http://mashable.com/category/mashable-spotlight/ http://mashable.com/category/mashable-spotlight/
    - JetSpiegel 13y ago
      Top Story: The Justin Biebers of Minecraft Are Rewriting the Marketing Playbook Just...

krenoten 13y ago

I hope you are deliberately lying about where this is still going on, otherwise why are you jeopardizing this potentially important operation by bragging about where you're conducting it? You are only inviting trouble from the thugs. Would the downvoter care to come out of their dark corner and explain why I am wrong?

maaarghk 13y ago
Not the downvoter and don't think it's worth a downvote but don't think the comment said anything not mentioned in (at least) the NY times article.
- devconsole 13y ago
  One other consideration: by posting their comment, they've leaked their ip address, which is a proxy for their location.
willvarfar 13y ago
I've seen it on the BBC news. The place is swarming with activists and reporters. Its definitely not being done in secret.
- krenoten 13y ago
  I was unaware of the BBC (or any) major media coverage of this. It still worries me that this is going the route of "everybody look at this" to keep it secure. It does take a certain amount of trust among participants to go the route of "ok guys, we are going to handle these in a secret place until the job's done and we can distribute all at once," but the chosen route paints a very large bullseye on the operation. I would imagine that it would not be hard for the police to justify a raid to reclaim classified documents, but maybe someone more familiar with the situation than myself could explain why this is less likely than my paranoid mind tells me?
  - nullymcnull 13y ago

gesman 13y ago

For the ones who have hard time remembering how to spell it: http://c.gg/yl http://c.gg/yl

kwamenum86 13y ago
Expert troll?
davidrudder 13y ago
I took the admittedly stupid approach of just clicking the link, while at work, with my office door open. As it turns out, it's on the up-and-up, all good, works as expected.
- gesman 13y ago
  No danger here :) Just making things easier to use.

kmfrk 13y ago

It looks like the photos are upside-down, when you go to a specific page and click to zoom in. Didn't know where else to report it.

sp332 13y ago
The detail page has a "Rotate" button, down next to "Next" and "Previous".

spoiledtechie 13y ago

Whats the site powered by? Did you just throw it together or is it a CMS?

pudo 13y ago
Django, MySQL, S3+CloudFront, Tesseract and lots of duct tape...

donohoe 13y ago

You should look at DocumentCloud and see if it would be helpful for hosting and managing the documents you're finding. http://www.documentcloud.org/home http://www.documentcloud.org/home https://github.com/documentcloud https://github.com/documentcloud It might be ideal for your needs. The project uses Tesseract‘s OCR to read documents and OpenCalais to pull data from them, including key people, places, and dates.

jdimov 13y ago
I doubt Tesseract will do well with handwritten Ukrainian... and I am positive OpenCalais won't detect anything in that language.
pudo 13y ago
The project initially used DocumentCloud, but I guess that's built for scenarios which are a little less horrible than single-page JPEGs coming in via FTP. Tesseract has been working beautifully, we've got the first 1500 documents sent through it. Unfortunately, we don't know the language of each document (trying to get up some crowdsourcing for that), so each gets sent through three times (eng, rus, ukr). Finally, all versions are indexed in ElasticSearch. If anyone has a neater way of doing this (e.g. a good, Python-based language detector), please shout!

thorntonbf 13y ago

Corrupt governments' greatest nightmare is transparency. It's amazing that these documents were discarded so carelessly. That alone probably says a lot about the competency of the Yanukovych government at large. Good luck and Godspeed! Here's hoping that some of the information found here can be used as evidence and will speed the transition to a better government. Stay safe out there.

rdtsc 13y ago
> It's amazing that these documents were discarded so carelessly. If there are criminals (and there are) at least let's hope they are incompetent and stupid they can be found and caught easily. Or that those chasing them a fast enough for the criminals to make mistakes on their way out. The former East German government in its final days tried to shred documents, and it did. It left mountains of single strip shredded documents. Well, it turns out it is possible to painstakingly reconstruct those. There is software that can help as well. http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/puzzling-together-the-past-new-computer-program-to-reassemble-shredded-stasi-files-a-482136.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/puzzling-togethe... They should have burt them, then mixed the ash with water and dumped it in a landfill, but, well glad there were not competent enough or these enacting the change were coming fast enough on their heels.
rjzzleep 13y ago
name one government that is not corrupt edit: funny i'd like to know what the down vote is about. it's not a snarky response i'm being full serious here right now. i don't know a single one. that's not how governments operate
- avn2109 13y ago
  In general I'm with you on this one, but maybe the Nordic states? Or maybe extremely small states a la Lichtenstein, where the complexity and amounts of money involved in governance are so low that corruption hardly pays off at all.

mpyne 13y ago

I wish you guys all the best. :) I've been arguing with a friend of mine the past few days who's convinced all of this is just some kind of CIA operation to get back at Putin for reasons. Or something. Also that people should never be able to protest about their "democratically-elected government".

mladenkovacevic 13y ago
The very idea that CIA would somehow be involved in a violent and coordinated coup for the purposes of advancing its geopolitical interests.... Somebody get your friend a tinfoil hat amiright or amiright! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_regime_change_actions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_re...
- mpyne 13y ago
  Just like a model of the solar system of epicycles-within-epicycles that accurately predicts the location of Jupiter a few times must be the explanation for all further observations of Jupiter, right?

shirman 13y ago

Слава Украине! И привет из Москвы ;)