Every Deleted Parler Post, Many With Users' Location Data, Has Been Archived

[sboatcar]

https://gizmodo.com/every-deleted-parler-post-many-with-users-location-dat-1846032466


In the wake of the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by scores of President Trump’s supporters, a lone researcher began an effort to catalogue the posts of social media users across Parler, a platform founded to provide conservative users a safe haven for uninhibited “free speech” — but which ultimately devolved into a hotbed of far-right conspiracy theories, unchecked racism, and death threats aimed at prominent politicians.

The researcher, who asked to be referred to by their Twitter handle, @donk_enby, began with the goal of archiving every post from January 6, the day of the Capitol riot; what she called a bevy of “very incriminating” evidence. According to the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, among others, Parler is one of a number of apps used by the insurrections to coordinate their breach of the Capitol, in a plan to overturn the 2020 election results and keep Donald Trump in power.



There's a lot of information about how they managed to do it. They were able to access over 70tb of data from the site, deleted messages, current posts, direct messages, location data, etc.

This story is about to really heat up soon

[Phoenix61]

1. I don't understand how people STILL don't get it

that every single post to the Internet lives forever. There isn’t any “delete” Kudos to them for collecting it all in one nice neat package.

[sboatcar]

2. The slapshod way they did the programming meant that deleted data was never deleted

it was just tagged 'deleted' and hidden.

That means that its ALL in there. I can't wait for people to start digging through the data.

[Massacure]

9. I don't think I would call their programming slapshod

When working with databases, physical and a logical deletes both have their advantages and disadvantages. Logical deletes - marking data as deleted and hiding it instead of physically removing it - is useful when there exists an intent to leave an audit trail. Of less importance, it also means the programmer does not need to worry about orphaned records, data in ancillary tables that has no context without the deleted data.

That said, the audit trail in this case is going to come back to unexpectedly bite a lot of people.

[sboatcar]

11. Given that it was supposed to be so secure and private

I would have thought that they'd have some kind of automated process to clean up deleted data, but its good that they didn't.

[Massacure]

12. I'll add another comment since you mentioned an automated process to clean up

There are times where a hybrid approach between logical and physical deletes is used. For example, data will be logically deleted and then a secondary process will come through and physically delete data that was logically deleted X months ago. A company may do this when there is a regulatory requirement to keep data for a certain amount of time. The approach ensures that the data is made unavailable for normal users (and since the database are usually heavily tuned to ignore irrelevant data, it takes less time to return results) but allows an IT developer to go and query the data if necessary.

[sboatcar]

13. That makes sense

I guess we'll find out soon enough how often they did cleanups on the back end. 70tb of data is quite a bit to sift through.

[jeffreyi]

16. +++1, squared and cubed!

[Bettie]

18. That's why I sometimes type things up and then

once I read how angry I was, just stop and don't press "send" or "post" or whatever.

Feels good to get it out, but not for public consumption sometimes.

[Phoenix61]

19. +1nt

[Mike 03]

3. "Great Job everyone"

Link to tweet

I'm definitely following this account.

Thank you for posting.

[BobTheSubgenius]

20. IF there is nothing for you to be held "accountable" for, you have no worries.

But we all know how likely it is that you've not divulged, bragged or lied about anything on a sewer like Parler, so I guess you're back to worrying.

I wonder how long any of you can go without stepping on your own dicks. Under a week, certainly. Worry more.

[calimary]

21. Great strategic thinking!

Glad that’s been captured and saved! For the record!

Whatever is considered bad news for those bad guys is GOOD for the rest of us.

[catbyte]

4. LOL. Now each of those traitors will be spending a lot of time worrying, looking over

their shoulders, wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. They'll flinch at every knock at the door, every time their boss calls them into the office, every unfamiliar phone call. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of seditionists.

[dalton99a]

6. And they'll be turning against one another

[CaptYossarian]

10. Locked in the prison of their paranoia.

[Tree-Hugger]

5. LoL

"Things will get better before they get worse. " Yep, that's what insurrectionists can expect.

[Lucky Luciano]

17. I saw that one! LOL

[getagrip_already]

7. Parler also INSISTED on a real ID to sign up....

Not that it couldn't be faked, but a lot of dumb asses likely revealed their real names when signing up.

Images of drivers licenses is pretty good evidence when combined with gps data.

[HipChick]

8. Nothing really gets deleted on the Internet

[inanna]

14. kicking post

[OnDoutside]

15. Here's a quality twitter thread between Hugh Fuckin Hewitt and Seth Rogan....Lol

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

Link to tweet