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Government The Internet Open Source United States

Researchers Launch Open-Source Website To Hunt Down Capitol Insurrectionists (huffpost.com) 500

SysEngineer shares a report from HuffPost: Some of the citizen sleuths behind the open-source effort to identify the hundreds of Donald Trump-loving rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol have launched an impressive new website that organizes the stunning amount of digital evidence collected about the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The website, Jan6evidence.com, was built by a small team of volunteer software developers, using the work of open-source investigators looking into the deadly Capitol attack. The site features a color-coded timeline that reflects the time of day, and allows users to click around on a map of the Capitol and pull up any video evidence from a particular location and time frame. Users can even track an individual suspect's movements over the course of Jan. 6.

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Researchers Launch Open-Source Website To Hunt Down Capitol Insurrectionists

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  • by dknj ( 441802 ) on Wednesday March 10, 2021 @10:50PM (#61146204) Journal

    I found myself rapidly pressing F5 on 4chan and thedonald.win in the weeks leading up to the Jan6 rally. Right around Decemberish I started watching all of the fringe forums I could think of. And I found exactly what I was expecting.. There were tons of memes and what I can only assume are AI bots that antagonized everyone into a frenzy. There were confirmed reports of people being in DC at the time. I wonder if anyone has any of the threads that spawned leading up to and during the attempt.

    And this is not limited to just those two sites, there are many underground forums that have since cleared out large swaths of comments. Reddit's conspiracy subreddit, for instance, had a moderator disappear immediately after the attack. Along with him went tons of threads and comments from foreign agents (or bots?) that had responded to some of my research accounts.

    Things that make you go hmmm

    • by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Wednesday March 10, 2021 @11:39PM (#61146350) Journal

      I think it highly likely that the insurrection was an inside job: a real attempt to overthrow government.

      Consider that:
      1. The police were inadequately equipped for the day and not deployed to properly defend the Capitol.
      2. The commander of the national guard lost the authority to bring the national guard into action the day before the insurrection
      3. It took 3 hours for the people with authority to decide to actually defend the Capitol.

      I have no idea what the thinking was behind planning for an insurrection, but I think that there were some very suspicious actions by those who were about to lose their power and authority.

      There was a claim that a military or military-like presence would be bad optics, but those making the decisions had no qualms about such optics when there was a BLM protest at the Capitol.

      • The running theory is that Trump was hoping to declare martial law and use the confusion to seize power. He pissed off the military so it didn't work.
      • What was the actual plan, though? My best guess is that enough Democratic House members are killed that Trump can create a state of emergency and use the now Republican-majority Congress to rubber-stamp everything, including the transfer of power even though these moves would be technically unconstitutional. Even if the Supreme Court rules the moves unconstitutional, there's no enforcement mechanism and Trump keeps rolling on lies and false legitimacy claimed by "Congress vote". Trump holds onto power il

        • by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Thursday March 11, 2021 @10:16AM (#61147598) Homepage Journal

          The big thing that holds me back from thinking that the Capitol riot was an attempt at a putsch is how halfhearted all of it seemed.

          It wasn't half-hearted, it was sincere as all hell. It was half-assed, because ultimately at some point Trump was in charge and everything he does is half-assed because he's half-brained. People close to Trump claim that he actually believes the lie that he won the election. Let's take that at face value for a second and see where that rabbit hole goes. If true it explains how Trump is such an effective manipulator despite clearly not being all that smart. If he believes his own bullshit, it makes it much easier to sell because he speaks with conviction, and for many people that's all it takes.

    • No one who is replying to you, seems to consider the keywords in your statement -- "foreign agents". This is what we have to deal with. The illusion of choice in our democracy (i.e. that both candidates ultimately will support many of the same policies) combined with foreign powers exploiting the mass's biases, means that our system is totally self-canabalizing.

      It's too easy to create the content that will exploit people and people seem to lack either the education or reasoning to realize the scale of explo

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Thursday March 11, 2021 @08:34AM (#61147198) Homepage Journal

        The illusion of choice in our democracy (i.e. that both candidates ultimately will support many of the same policies) combined with foreign powers exploiting the mass's biases, means that our system is totally self-canabalizing.

        At the last election there was more difference between the two candidates than there had been for decades.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Lots of bots, and lots of people cashing in by asking for "donations". Lots of people just caught up in the QAnon frenzy that made them feel smart and like they were part of something important.

      The shock they experienced when they realized that they were not saving America, that Trump wasn't standing by them and their their revolution had failed...

  • by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Wednesday March 10, 2021 @11:20PM (#61146306)

    Just want to clarify that when they say it's "open-source" they mean it's open-source intelligence [wikipedia.org].

    Open-source intelligence (OSINT) is a multi-methods (qualitative, quantitative) methodology for collecting, analyzing and making decisions about data accessible in publicly available sources to be used in an intelligence context. In the intelligence community, the term "open" refers to overt, publicly available sources (as opposed to covert or clandestine sources).

    Basically, it's information that has been scooped up off the web and has nothing to do with open source software.

  • not sure... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tom ( 822 ) on Thursday March 11, 2021 @12:25AM (#61146430) Homepage Journal

    Whenever stories like that pop up, I'm not sure how I should feel about it.

    Should I applaud the goal and purpose, or should I worry about the methods?

    This is a witch hunt with modern technology. Remember who started it when on the next BLM riots the extreme rights are using the same methods to hunt down black people who want equal treatment. Or when the evangalists use it to hunt down people who bothered them on their anti-abortion rallies. Or when the chinese government uses it to find protesters in Hong Kong. Or spanish neo-fascists use it to throw Catalonian independence supporters in jail for a decade.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Tailhook ( 98486 )

      Should I applaud the goal and purpose, or should I worry about the methods?

      You are required to enthusiastically applaud these tactics and the narrative used to justify them, comrade. Think carefully about future posts on these matters as well if you wish to remain employable.

    • This is a witch hunt with modern technology

      Is that what you called it when you got a speeding ticket? It's a witch hunt, officer! What about when you shoplifted a VCR back in the 80s and got caught? It's a witch hunt your honour!

      Getting caught after committing a crime is many things, but a witch hunt isn't one of them.

      [Since many people here are imperious to hyperbole, I mean you in the general you as a rhetorical device. I' not accusing you personally of shoplifting a VCR]

      • by Tom ( 822 )

        If they try to give me a speeding ticket by checking on everyone who drove that road that day, then yes, that's a witch hunt.

        And if instead of using the speed cam picture and sending me a ticket they plaster my face all over the Internet and write "do you know this man, he was speeding?" then that's hardly fitting the crime, too.

  • It's amazing how people self-brainwashed to do the work of KGB for free and on their own time. Gone are the days when government spooks steam opened the envelopes, trailed people on the street and roughed someone up or gathered Kompromat to intimidate them. Nowadays we are more happy to hack and doxx each other without anyone putting guns to our heads and roughing up unpopular speakers is very much a thing.

    Now you might say that capitol rioters deserve it, but that's beside the point. Most of KGB work also

    • If people were so concerned with the consequences of their actions they shouldn't have live streamed themselves. These people had to know what they were doing was wrong and I don't feel bad in the least about them being ratted out.

  • It Sam Hyde, all Sam Hyde, how does he keep getting away with this? He must be stopped!

  • this is called a witch hunt. I predict that it will continue with even the mere accusation being the equivalent of a conviction in the court of public opinion. Visions of McCarthyism dancing in my head.

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