Both organizations have had reputations for being honeypots as early as 2016. There have been a number of instances of federal agents becoming embedded in the organizational structures of groups like this (see e.g. the Malheur Wildlife Standoff and the plot to assassinate Gretchen Whitmer). Groups of this scale tend to fall into one of three categories: 1) They are honeypots set up by policing and / or intelligence agencies, 2) they start off as legitimate (though potentially not-yet radicalized) organizations that are compromised by a member turning informant when the radicalization begins to alarm them, or 3) they start off as radical organizations and are compromised after a federal agency threatens the leadership with jail time or influences them into becoming informants. It's quite common for the FBI to frame this as "helping to keep people safe"; leaders in groups like this are frequently easy to manipulate with flattery.
I've been struck by how often it is really quite senior people within criminal/terrorist organisations are the ones that get turned by the various agencies.
In the UK, there was an informant for MI5 in the IRA for years codenamed Steaknife. It turned out he was the head of IRA internal security, it was his job to hunt moles. He was the perfect agent. I seem to remember a story of a mafia don who turned out to be an informant, which seems wild to me.
A telling example where such a ploy failed to play out and got exposed was Ruby Ridge. An independently minded off-grid man with his family, some loose social contacts with a nearby neo-nazi group. Randomly gets paid to turn a 16 inch shotgun into a 15 inch shotgun, which is a felony crime, now they blackmail him to hook up with the neo nazis and inform or take those sawing off of a shotgun type charges.
Ended up with a standoff outside their house when a dog barking at agents snooping around became a gunfight, lost his wife and newborn kid to an overly exuberant DEA sniper
The characterization of "informants" as being literal on the payroll feds is usually incorrect. They're usually genuine group members who are being manipulated by literal on the payroll feds.
And you're missing a key feedback loop. The feds typically "create" an informant by digging up dirt on someone and blackmailing them into ratting on their buddies in exchange for non-prosecution. This informant then has a huge f-ing reason to radicalize the group and see to it that they do or attempt to do something worthy of prosecution so that they can make good on their promise to the feds.
So otherwise potentially benign groups wind up getting turned into hotbeds of extremism basically because the feds demand extremists to prosecute.
This is a workflow that dates back at least as far as the war on drugs where you'd have small time traffickers would get turned into informants and then work tirelessly to push their boss's or suppliers business to the next level while collecting evidince for their handlers. It was used on racist and religious extremist groups in the 80s and 90s and then on muslim religious groups in the 00s and now you're seeing it again with right wing groups.
It is quite funny on 4chan and similar places watching everyone accuse everyone else that protests in some way of being a fed. Which I guess is job done for the security services.
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.
I remember reading in the early 00s archived posts from the early 90s wherein people cracked jokes about the racist groups of the time being barbecue clubs for feds.
These people are typically the true believers in the Republic. They also believe they are taking down existential threats to the republic. Finally, they believe in defense in layers.
You know what they don't believe in? Playing fair.
No. I wouldn't count on new homeland security leadership appointees having a "free hand" in practice. All of them will discover that their phone, internet and location activity is known to the security agencies. All of that information is also known for their associates. Couple that with the fact that you're dealing with new appointees whose ideology is essentially based more in superiority rather than patriotism, and it points to a lot in that data trove that would be of interest to the kind of people who keep the FBI running from the shadows.
In fact, my bet is that this series of appointees will be far more easily controlled than ones appointed by some red, white and blue boy scout with a martyr complex like McCain would have been for instance. I'd wager there are probably some people in our homeland security infrastructure who actually prefer our appointed leadership be comprised of people who are more malleable.
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.)
> 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".
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.
Gen X is in their mid-fifties. Boomers are in their 70s now. But yes, it is Boomer content, and the pick of the 1911 is a weirdly hilarious tell. That's the sidearm from WWII so it's the one all the Boomers' dad's wore into Europe & the Pacific. Of course Jesus would choose the 1911 lmao
> 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.
What kind of ridiculous copium is this?
i'm sure the quilting community says all sorts of terrible things that could be taken out of context.
the difference is they don't have a long history of gun violence. ain't no one showed up and killed 20 elementary kids with knitting needles. no one smuggled a crochet gear to a 17 year old and saw protesters crochet'd to death.
and what is your 2nd amendment right doing now? the government, and arguably global economy, is under threat and you're doing what exactly with these guns?
I don't think "God, Family, and Guns" is the "militia member" or "gun nut" you're looking for. In fact, you probably won't find any of them on YouTube. YouTube's rules for firearm contents basically mean you get much more tame contents on YouTube than elsewhere. You might have to go look on Rumble, but I wouldn't know what channels there or elsewhere because I only use YouTube.
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.
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.
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)
> 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
"Trust, but verify". In this case, none of this is admissable in court (assuming there IS anything illegal in here, I haven't finished reading beyond people selling merch) because it wasn't done by the book, but it can give enough leads for further investigation, like marking people as "person of interest", cross referencing with other known activities by the people involved, etc. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> Riots are fundamentally ineffective; I doubt anyone serious wants to be associated with rioters. I suppose stranger things happen.
bullshit. the only reason you have an 8 hour work day and a semblance of worker protections is because a lot of people fought and died for them.
it's the only reason 8 year olds don't go down into the mines, or lose hands working in factories.
Jan 6th made a serious run at congressional officials; the VP of the US basically had to hide or get lynched. this could have been a thing, but didn't go all the way.
> > 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Readit News
In the UK, there was an informant for MI5 in the IRA for years codenamed Steaknife. It turned out he was the head of IRA internal security, it was his job to hunt moles. He was the perfect agent. I seem to remember a story of a mafia don who turned out to be an informant, which seems wild to me.
And you're missing a key feedback loop. The feds typically "create" an informant by digging up dirt on someone and blackmailing them into ratting on their buddies in exchange for non-prosecution. This informant then has a huge f-ing reason to radicalize the group and see to it that they do or attempt to do something worthy of prosecution so that they can make good on their promise to the feds.
So otherwise potentially benign groups wind up getting turned into hotbeds of extremism basically because the feds demand extremists to prosecute.
This is a workflow that dates back at least as far as the war on drugs where you'd have small time traffickers would get turned into informants and then work tirelessly to push their boss's or suppliers business to the next level while collecting evidince for their handlers. It was used on racist and religious extremist groups in the 80s and 90s and then on muslim religious groups in the 00s and now you're seeing it again with right wing groups.
Deleted Comment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_pl...
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.
This is not a new thing.
These people are typically the true believers in the Republic. They also believe they are taking down existential threats to the republic. Finally, they believe in defense in layers.
You know what they don't believe in? Playing fair.
No. I wouldn't count on new homeland security leadership appointees having a "free hand" in practice. All of them will discover that their phone, internet and location activity is known to the security agencies. All of that information is also known for their associates. Couple that with the fact that you're dealing with new appointees whose ideology is essentially based more in superiority rather than patriotism, and it points to a lot in that data trove that would be of interest to the kind of people who keep the FBI running from the shadows.
In fact, my bet is that this series of appointees will be far more easily controlled than ones appointed by some red, white and blue boy scout with a martyr complex like McCain would have been for instance. I'd wager there are probably some people in our homeland security infrastructure who actually prefer our appointed leadership be comprised of people who are more malleable.
Dead Comment
they may not have had that bias before, but I'd bet in 6 months, when stocked full of MAGA new-hires, it's a different story.
Deleted Comment
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
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".
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.
What kind of ridiculous copium is this?
i'm sure the quilting community says all sorts of terrible things that could be taken out of context.
the difference is they don't have a long history of gun violence. ain't no one showed up and killed 20 elementary kids with knitting needles. no one smuggled a crochet gear to a 17 year old and saw protesters crochet'd to death.
and what is your 2nd amendment right doing now? the government, and arguably global economy, is under threat and you're doing what exactly with these guns?
Deleted Comment
Feed it to a local model?
If so: Wikileaks made/makes(?) all of their stuff easily browseable, "her emails" included.
Data dredgers will love you because now we don’t have to use Beautiful Soup to reconstruct 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.
(note: arrests, because whether the chats were recorded legally and are admissable to court is a whole different matter)
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
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.
Dead Comment
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.
> 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.
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.
bullshit. the only reason you have an 8 hour work day and a semblance of worker protections is because a lot of people fought and died for them.
it's the only reason 8 year olds don't go down into the mines, or lose hands working in factories.
Jan 6th made a serious run at congressional officials; the VP of the US basically had to hide or get lynched. this could have been a thing, but didn't go all the way.
77 pages isn't that much in the scheme of thing. A court case having 77 pages of evidence would be entirely normal.
> ...
> 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.
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.
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