Disinfodrome Proffers 2024-07-03

Datasets in need of shot callers.

One of the things that happened during second quarter, but which wasn’t well describd here, is that one of my peers turned up with a crew that was interested in the content that became MIOS: Iran’s PressTV. That story didn’t just happen, that person ground on it solo for six months, then recruited interested parties, and finally I shared it with Joe Menn. The treasure chest was liberated by Black Reward and credit for nosing around until the goods were visible goes to NAFO’s Canine Intelligence Agency.

The content from MIOS: Russpublicans has been placed, but there’s been a persistent vibe that we need something more to get over the publication hurdle. There will be some big (but disloyal!) dogs with a LOT of egg on their faces if this works.

PressTV was not a unique thing, it’s just the first to bear fruit in a way that was publicly attributed to me.

Attention Conservation Notice:

This is the first of what will be a periodic posting of datasets that have been made accessible, but which lack someone to drive the analysis to publication cycle. Please skim, spin your Rolodex, and introduce potentially interested parties.

Available Inventory For 2024-07-03:

Item 1) Arizona Cyber Ninjas FOIA Data really should have someone on it given the recent indictments. Sorry for the enormous graph, but there is a LOT going on there.

Item 2) The PressTV story was just a good start, there’s plenty more cheddar in there. Nobody has done anything with the nearly 30,000 call detail records from PressTV’s internal phone system, but that has more to do with the slow progress in enriching this so it’s more than just phone numbers.

There are already a dozen journalists with access and we added one more last night. If you’re worried about getting scooped, let’s talk, because we’ve muddled along thus far without that being an issue.

Item 3) While not yet complete, I am in the process of restoring the Twitter streaming system to operational status. This won’t be capturing information any more, the API is prohibitively expensive, at least $5,000 monthly for what I used to have for free. A recording of some 220 million tweets and user profiles involved in the influence operation that led to the January 6th Capitol Siege are available on my Figshare. This would be more for AI research than any investigation work at this point.

The dehydration mentioned here only affects the data on Figshare, what’s on the ArangoDB/Elasticsearch system is the original full text.

Shared Resources:

The demo system contains the entire Trump Russia investigation data. No, really, almost 14,000 pages that include every FBI FD-302 from the investigation.

Trump FEC Data has one article queued up but I’m sure there are many more things to see in the nearly half a million pages of FEC filings.

Those working in this area are also welcome to query me about the MAGA Meltdown Maltego graph. There are 1,427 source URLs in this, mostly top tier news organizations, court documents, and about 200 tweets that are “connective tissue” - things that don’t get into articles, but that you would find in books.

If you give me a couple names, I can almost immediately return a list of their associates and links to notable episodes in which they were involved. Turnaround time is literally on the order of three minutes for small requests, while something larger may require a bit of grooming, taking perhaps half an hour.

Fundraiser

I’d rather put in work than solicit donations, but this herd of hobby horses is eating me out of house and home. Thus far in 2024 we have received:

• Anonymous donors provided roughly $800 earlier this year for various items, most unfortunately the Scraptop.

• A person who was upgrading provided two Apple laptops and an iPhone XR.

• We received a verbal commit in June that will cover two large NAS drives and a newer Dell server, which was much needed with our 16TB disks around 90% full.

• A long term donor covered the $500 annual Maltego license renewal.

Outstanding needs include:

• Only one of the three 1U (1.75” tall) rack mount servers has a $100/month sponsor covering its cost, and we need a minimum of three for our Proxmox cluster.

• Cloudflare Access wants between $3 and $7/month for the twenty accounts using Disinfodrome if we want to see logs, which we really do.

• We are safe thanks to using Substack, but if we had the $25/month Cloudflare Pro there are some additional things that could be done.

• I completed Google Analytics and Semrush training in May and paid the $130/month for the first level Semrush account in June, but can’t continue that.

• We’ve spent $300 in Monero so far this year, which facilitates us looking at things without them looking back at us, and could make good use of 4x that amount.

Conclusion:

I think we’ll do this more or less monthly. I will probably set up a rolling “Available Inventory” post in the Disinfodrome area.

I think next month is the five year anniversary of my first receiving the suggestion that I needed to hunt up a document indexing solution. Onward and upward …