Formal Apology: The Grayzone
I have made a terrible mistake with the PressTV data.
Since the Washington Post article by Joe Menn News site editor’s ties to Iran, Russia show misinformation’s complexity, there has been a storm of controversy online over it. I became worried that I might have made a mistake somewhere along the way, and in review I found that I have.
First, I am going to admit my wrongdoing.
I told Joe we had converted all of the PressTV material for him to review and that statement is INCORRECT. We had only converted and indexed the 15,125 emails. The 17,041 attachments were still sitting in a prep folder, invisible to the Disinfodrome search system.
Second, I am going to start correcting this oversight immediately. I will be double checking my work as I go, but over the rest of today, June 5th, 2024, the missing documents will become available to those with access with access to the system.
Example Hazard:
As an example of the sort of hazard this incomplete indexing of data could create, imagine this scenario.
U.S. person has sent their name, address, DOB, bank name, account number, bank routing number, and an invoice to a PressTV mailbox.
Email contains discussion about sanction evasion methods.
An attachment, instead of containing additional incriminating information, has this gif attached.
If this is the case, something that appears to be not just a violation of OFAC controls, but perhaps even a FARA registration problem, would instead be some sort of practical joke, albeit orders of magnitude more complex than anything I’ve ever done to baffle and irritate my friends.
Unintentional Comedy:
This has to be the funniest thing I’ve seen in the un-indexed documents thus far.
This was funny, but it is expired. There were a couple of these among the documents.
Foreshadowing … including professional twerp Kit Klarenberg, no less. If you missed this when it was fresh, Signal vs Telegram contains the final disposition.
And there it goes, just grinding away on indexing. The bursts of activity and the high LAV are due to other things happening on the system that hosts this VPS. Things which are also not good for various hostile nation states other than Iran.
Conclusion:
خداوند هر که را بخواهد تقدیس می کند.
Today is the 80th anniversary of my god father Ernst wading through the surf on Omaha beach. He was in the third wave and he made it as far as Bastonge before a pair of never removed Nazi MG-42 bullets sent him home with a permanent hitch in his stride. His younger brother, Elvin, survived the retreat from Chosin. They grew up forty miles from my cousin Glenn, who perished when the Arisun Maru was torpedoed.
I don’t have anything left to prove around here, but that doesn’t mean I’m about to stop. I just hope my ancestors see me as a worthy successor.
I’ll leave you with some mood music …