Exploring the Paramilitary Leaks
33 comments
·March 5, 2025null
mannyv
With a big dump like this, the Disney one, Clinton's emails, efc - what would you want to be able to do?
DANmode
Search, in a browser?
Feed it to a local model?
If so: Wikileaks made/makes(?) all of their stuff easily browseable, "her emails" included.
ferguess_k
TBH I wouldn't be surprised if these organizations are infested with FBI agents.
wildzzz
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_pl...
sixothree
I would be less surprised if it were the other way around.
bigbacaloa
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mjfl
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wildzzz
Sometimes the enemy of your enemy is your friend, other times they are just another enemy. Playing both sides does sometimes get messy but that's the next generation's problem.
mjfl
It's pretty disgusting to demand a domestic crackdown on your political opponents because of the 'threat' posed by an extremist group that you are covertly funding, training, and controlling, which is what happened with Azov.
getlawgdon
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
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, the same one might get from reading /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.
cpufry
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lurk2
> 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
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
Did he or did he not make the (thus far unfounded) claim that Scot Seddon's condemnation of political violence was insincere?
roenxi
> 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
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.
bawolff
> > 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
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
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.
cvp
> 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
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.
WatchDog
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.
jfjrrirjrjrrjj
Does this cover antifa movement and far left groups? A few years ago they occupied part of US with automatic weapons!
diggan
The source is 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
> 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, and there have been a few high-profile shootings during these demonstrations.
1617432028
I think that this is a leak of a particular right-wing group, not leaks of left-wing groups?
What incident are you referring to where part of the US was occupied with automatic weapons? The closest thing I can think of is the Seattle CHOP/CHAZ/whatever the heck it's called. But AFAIK people there were only open carrying semi-automatic weapons, not fully automatic ones.
bigbacaloa
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