Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

"The campaigns with the biggest apparent international reach were under the name of an organisation called Chance Letikva (Chance for Hope, in English) - registered in Israel and the US."

Chance Letikva is registered with the US IRS as a charity. They've filed a Form 990. Location is Brooklyn, NY. [1] Address is listed. It's a small house. It's also incorporated as CHANCE LETIKVA, INC. in New York State. Address matches. Names of officers not given. There's one name in the IRS filing, listed as the president.

Web site "https://chanceletikva.org" has been "suspended". Domain is still registered, via Namecheap.

Some on the ground digging and subpoenas should reveal who's behind this.

[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/852...

View on HN

The article says they visited both the US and Israel registration addresses and didn't find the organisation's offices. I was impressed by the amount of "on the ground digging" by the journalists here!

Pretty impressive work. I always wondered what all those correspondents do that news organisations employ all over the world. I guess that's one of those things.

I’m… not sure what’s there to wonder, really. They do the exact same thing as reporters back home: journalism. Meaning write articles and do investigative work required for writing articles, whether going to press conferences, finding people to interview, or something like this, called investigative journalism.

A news piece in a foreign affairs section is likely to have been written by a correspondent because that’s what their job and specialty is. If it’s an op-ed or a commentary or analysis piece, even more so. It’s not like you can do good journalism without boots on the ground, no matter how connected the world is these days.

It's really not that hard to find someone to go to check a address, redditors do this all the time. It should be expected as basic journalism, especially with high claims.

Check an address and interview anyone resident there in a way that gets useful answers to the questions at hand.

In this instance it was a bust because no one useful was there. But if the mastermind behind the whole operation was there you’d want a professional to ask them questions. Because once they know they’ve been rumbled they’re probably going to disappear.

I am pretty sure the BBC, like most bug enough news outlets, has antennas all over the world.

If only this was the actual standard for journalism and not copy pasting half understood content with additional spin.

If what you are typically reading is

>[copypasta] half understood content with additional spin

then what you are reading is not journalism.

> then what you are reading is not journalism

In most cases, if you aren't paying for it, it is not journalism.

Why does every discussion have to wind up with a digression thread about how "real" or, even worse, "basic" journalism is something from a sepia-tinged golden age of muckrakers getting blitzed with Dorothy Parker? People are trying. There's lots of shıt masquerading as journalism, but this ain't it.

> Why does every discussion have to wind up with a digression thread about how "real" or, even worse, "basic" journalism

Hardly surprising given the contrast to the level of journalistic integrity on display at the Beeb recently.

I agree - I noticed this as well. Also feels like it such an upsetting story that someone was motivated to really to the bottom of it. They also probably knew that if the story got traction people would be running down there own checks.

I mean it does feel like that should be standard operation for journalism on bigger stories but I think our expectations from journalists have really fallen over the last 5 years with all the slop coming in.

The behavior that this article outlines is outrageous. But it makes me uncomfortable for this to be the kind of place where anonymous strangers self-investigate lurid allegations against random accused, no matter how disturbing the allegations.

Most of us don’t have the tools or the time to do it properly, at least on here; and that can end badly [0]. It rarely achieves a thoughtful considered outcome, and there are other places to do that kind of thing if you want to—some of those communities, like Bellingcat, seem pretty well-practiced in their methodologies, and their findings seem to have accordingly high impact.

[0] e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-22214511 … and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Sunil_Tripathi

is it normal for these places to have 0 liabilities? That alone seems like it ought to raise a flag - if you're not spending the money...

Edit: Clicked through some of the other entries in there and yeah, usually liabilities are relatively close to incomes. How the system didn't catch this is beyond me.

The fact that the website is suspended while the donation machinery was clearly active is… not a great sign

The article names Erez Hadari as someone involved with the organization.

> Chance Letikva is registered with the US IRS as a charity

At what point do audit requirements kick in for charities?

>Namecheap

Namecheap and scammers -- I dare you to name a more iconic duo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com