Parler user data exposed and exfiltrated

Exactly, as my friend working with the archivists has been telling me.

Any more details?

I know one major red flag for me was all the verification Parler was requesting. SSNs, and all that. There's no way that can end well.

"I have it on good authority"

that's some grade-A trolling right there. Congrats. All the Qanon et al.posts start the same way. i.e. I have it on good authority that....X will happen by Y tonight. blah blah blah. The storm.

And the entire post is in quotation marks, without it being clear what the person is quoting.

I guess they're quoting this twitter account? https://twitter.com/donk_enby

the data is available on the twitter account linked in the article including screenshots of internal moderation tools. Seems real enough.

edit: not sure about the no-fly stuff, that may as well be made up

Oh, I see you’ve never heard of the FBI.

FBI has taken over dark web porn sites (I shouldn't have to explain what that means) and used them as honeypots for months before making arrests. It's a pretty common tactic.

Yes and no.

It's inadmissable in court, but that data can be legally used as tips, leads and to inform an investigation for more legal data collection avenues: it's called Parallel Construction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

An example would be a police tip phone-number: it's all hearsay (unless it's a confession) and largely cannot be admitted into court directly, but it definitely leads to collecting solid evidence later on by investigators who can get warrants.

The FBI doesn't just up and tell people when it gets a warrant. They only have to disclose if they prosecute. And even then often not.

At this point were in national security letter territory.

There's a difference between allowed to use to investigate and allowed to use in court as valid evidence if it was not properly acquired with a valid warrant.

The issue is that 97% of all federal court cases are settled before trial and never reach that stage because people often admit guilt and take a plea deal and don't know their own rights.

Also relevant: https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE

Unrelated, but the fruit of the poison tree doctrine (which you are citing) has exceptions, like the good-faith exception.

Definitely not if they were the ones who obtained them. I can't remember what happens if a third party obtains them illegally and provides them to law enforcement.

I doubt it. There's a long history of self-important "we're going to create an alternative to X social media site/service, but with FrEe sPeEch!!!" sites built by largely incompetent grifters.

Yes. You had to take a picture of a government ID in order to get certain user privileges.

Parler's origin story can be summarised as:

- Former startup founder and Amazon dev meets beautiful Russian woman in Vegas

- Whirlwind romance

- Married in Russia

- Travels Russia for 6 months allegedly having meetings with tech people and lawyers

- Comes back to Vegas and starts social network with 'secret' (eg not publicly disclosed) investors.

None of that is necessarily a smoking gun. It could be entirely legitimate and above board, and just the story of how someone started a business that's right on the edge of what's socially acceptable for many people. But if you wanted to build a honeypot social network in the USA that is pretty much exactly how you'd do it.

One: it's super illegal. Two: didn't we just learn our collective lesson about doing illegal things just because we think they're for the greater good? I won't wade into if wide-scale hacking and doxing is better or worse than storming the capitol, but they're both pretty far down the path of the end justifies the means.

My goodness it’s a good thing you don’t freely associate with a site called Hacker News.