ChewToy: Jeffrey Epstein
Skill building investigations with Maltego & other tools.
This place feels weirdly empty without a quarterly project to keep things moving and focused. I have a simply enormous number of files, going back as much as fifteen years, and some of them are of public interest. I’m going to pick out some of the more accessible ones and make them available. The ChewToy series is going to run through the end of second quarter.
We’ll start with the worst of the worst - pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his associates.
Attention Conservation Notice:
We’re gonna take out some Maltego files, maybe have a Dropbox full of documents, and we’re going to get familiar with what is known about Epstein & Co. Finding things about him is a secondary objective, this is an investigation methods & tools oriented thing.
Maltego:
This is the Maltego graph I have for Jeffrey Epstein. I highlighted everything with “Epstein” in the name, got all of the neighbors of those nodes, then went a step further and got their neighbors, too.
You will need to install either Maltego or Case File. They’re the same software, but Case File is meant for law enforcement - it does not do external queries, which is fine for any ChewToy files.. This software will run on Linux, Mac, and Windows. There is a thirty minute Maltego Intro video for those of you who are brand new and ToolTime has some other Maltego specific stuff if you scroll back to 2023. You can pick up the original Epstein files here.
That large, dense cluster at the bottom of the first image has Donald Trump right at the center and there are a lot of other things in that set of “friends of friends“ nodes that are spurious. I gave it a good trim, from 397 down to 139 entities.
I did not know this when I decided to start writing today, but one of the key sources for this graph has been deleted. It was a Substack that looked like something I would do - a long timeline with dozens of links to newspapers of record, court documents, and so forth. My guess is the author was worried about their career, the article did not make the Wayback Machine, so I’m just going to call it DELETED.
I should say a bit about source quality in Maltego files. Here are the sorts of things you will find in the URLs.
Major newspapers, often the Washington Post.
Major magazines like Axios, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, etc.
Court documents, links to Congressional investigations, etc.
Links to civil society orgs like Lawfare, The 65 Project, etc.
A limited number of news transcripts, mostly CNN.
Tweets serving in a “conjunction” role.
There are about 200 tweets in the master file, they are generally accounts involved in keeping context. I didn’t use them for their conclusions, what’s typically there is a logical “AND” - showing relationships between well sourced newspaper articles, or other things along those lines.
Major Components:
There are five known sex offenders in that graph. Three of them were Lolita Express people, Nader is there due to ties to …
Israeli spooks. The notion that what Epstein was doing was a high value target extortion operation has come up repeatedly. There isn’t enough there to specifically pin it on Mossad, but it is simply impossible for that many high profile people to potentially be aware of or involved in sex crimes against minors without SOMEONE taking advantage of the situation.
There’s a Secretary Brainworm component of the graph - there were Ghislaine Maxwell associates backing his campaign.
And there are ties to the Intellectual Dark Web people. This is the part I know least.
I am very much regretting not saving the DELETED item. There was a LOT of cheddar there, given what I recall of it this image should be enough to send those of you inclined to dig on a very long adventure. This was all follow the money stuff.
Negative information is just as important as things that can be confirmed. Geoffrey Berman was the U.S. Attorney responsible for investigating Epstein’s suicide.
Data Broker Information:
This is paywalled so I kept it as a PDF. You’ll need to dig up your own. I wrote about this from the perspective of defending oneself from data brokers in Throw Away Your Cell Phone. I think the video linked in my article is sufficient if you can’t get at the print version of the investigation.
This is the most enticing thing of all - everyone who was there who had a cell phone on them is just cold caught.
Conclusion:
Given all the chatter in the news about the Epstein files this is a good time to bring this material out for review. I’m also relieved I’ve identified something we can use as a framework for second quarter. Even if you don’t care at all about Epstein, this is a single person sized investigation, no need for special tools beyond installing Maltego or CaseFile , no need for special knowledge, just start reading and paying close attention to the relationships you find.
I am glad we’ve found a good use for information on what are some of the objectively shittiest human beings who’ve ever lived. Fiat Justitia, Ruat Caelum - I don’t care who was on that plane, if they laid hands on one of those kids, hang ‘em.
Credit:MSNBC