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Comment by danohuiginn | Hacker News Reader

One of the participants here.

It's been a crazy few days. We have documents drying in the former president's sauna, prosecutors waiting for each file to be scanned before confiscating it, and an incredible group of journalists working night and day to save as many documents as possible.

A few articles with more background: http://gijn.org/2014/02/25/yanukovychleaks-org-how-ukraine-j... http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/ukrainian-journa... http://gijn.org/2014/02/27/yanukovychleaks-update-the-projec...

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Corrupt governments' greatest nightmare is transparency.

It's amazing that these documents were discarded so carelessly. That alone probably says a lot about the competency of the Yanukovych government at large.

Good luck and Godspeed! Here's hoping that some of the information found here can be used as evidence and will speed the transition to a better government. Stay safe out there.

> It's amazing that these documents were discarded so carelessly.

If there are criminals (and there are) at least let's hope they are incompetent and stupid they can be found and caught easily. Or that those chasing them a fast enough for the criminals to make mistakes on their way out.

The former East German government in its final days tried to shred documents, and it did. It left mountains of single strip shredded documents. Well, it turns out it is possible to painstakingly reconstruct those. There is software that can help as well.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/puzzling-togethe...

They should have burt them, then mixed the ash with water and dumped it in a landfill, but, well glad there were not competent enough or these enacting the change were coming fast enough on their heels.

name one government that is not corrupt

edit: funny i'd like to know what the down vote is about. it's not a snarky response i'm being full serious here right now. i don't know a single one. that's not how governments operate

In general I'm with you on this one, but maybe the Nordic states? Or maybe extremely small states a la Lichtenstein, where the complexity and amounts of money involved in governance are so low that corruption hardly pays off at all.

You should look at DocumentCloud and see if it would be helpful for hosting and managing the documents you're finding.

http://www.documentcloud.org/home

https://github.com/documentcloud

It might be ideal for your needs. The project uses Tesseract‘s OCR to read documents and OpenCalais to pull data from them, including key people, places, and dates.

I doubt Tesseract will do well with handwritten Ukrainian... and I am positive OpenCalais won't detect anything in that language.

The project initially used DocumentCloud, but I guess that's built for scenarios which are a little less horrible than single-page JPEGs coming in via FTP.

Tesseract has been working beautifully, we've got the first 1500 documents sent through it. Unfortunately, we don't know the language of each document (trying to get up some crowdsourcing for that), so each gets sent through three times (eng, rus, ukr). Finally, all versions are indexed in ElasticSearch. If anyone has a neater way of doing this (e.g. a good, Python-based language detector), please shout!

I wish you guys all the best. :)

I've been arguing with a friend of mine the past few days who's convinced all of this is just some kind of CIA operation to get back at Putin for reasons. Or something. Also that people should never be able to protest about their "democratically-elected government".

The very idea that CIA would somehow be involved in a violent and coordinated coup for the purposes of advancing its geopolitical interests.... Somebody get your friend a tinfoil hat amiright or amiright!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_re...

Just like a model of the solar system of epicycles-within-epicycles that accurately predicts the location of Jupiter a few times must be the explanation for all further observations of Jupiter, right?

For the ones who have hard time remembering how to spell it:

http://c.gg/yl

Expert troll?

I took the admittedly stupid approach of just clicking the link, while at work, with my office door open. As it turns out, it's on the up-and-up, all good, works as expected.

No danger here :) Just making things easier to use.

Whats the site powered by? Did you just throw it together or is it a CMS?

Django, MySQL, S3+CloudFront, Tesseract and lots of duct tape...

It looks like the photos are upside-down, when you go to a specific page and click to zoom in.

Didn't know where else to report it.

The detail page has a "Rotate" button, down next to "Next" and "Previous".

Слава Украине! И привет из Москвы ;)

hey there - i'm a reporter w/ @mashable, wondering if you might be free for to do a quick Q&A? sorry to barge in on the thread but this is super interesting to me personally. - @moneyries / moneyries at gmail.

Please let them do their important real work instead of your pseudo-journalism about social media.

Holy cow Sprint, that is a really vicious reply, and totally unwarranted.

Slightly warranted. It seems like there is some time-pressure (prosecutors confiscating files after scanning) that means any time taken away from archiving all this could lead to some things being hidden from public view if the prosecution suddenly decides to confiscate all the files.

It wasn't phrased particularly nicely, but it's got some reasoning behind it I think?

The BBC reported on this last night - saying something along the lines of there being a 72 hour recovery window (not sure if that means from being thrown into the lake or from being surfaced).

Quite a good report actually, they showed the drying and scanning. Apparently some documents were burned before being thrown into the lake also. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26361455

Welcome to HN, where the comments are bullshit and politeness doesn't matter.

It is harsh but I stand by it. Take a look at mashable.com and maybe you will understand my aggression.

Mashable reports a wide variety of stuff these days, like this current top story:

http://mashable.com/2014/02/27/russia-protect-ukraine-yanuko...

Of course! Anything that brings visitors who you can serve ads to is good content. Re-wording AP releases or stories from news websites does not take much time.

It's okay. News websites are easy to knock. Truth is we have spent months following this story and have a reporter on the ground in Kyiv. This is a sampling: http://mashable.com/category/ukraine-protests/. More here: https://www.google.com/search?q=ukraine+site%3Amashable.com&....

The article on Al Jazeera's imprisoned reporters was a really good read. I guess I should thank you for sending me there.

You mean the re-worded http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/02/al-jazeera-... ? You are welcome for me sending you to Al Jazeera.

So long as the journalist puts adds information on how to volunteer and help, press can be useful.

There's an email address listed on their profile, might be worth trying that.

Where's you public key?

Mashable writer with a public key? I think you are confusing them with a real news organization, not the site whose headlines currently include: "11 Funky Computer Mice That Really Click" and "25 Pieces of Food Jewelry Cute Enough to Eat"

http://mashable.com/category/mashable-spotlight/

Top Story:

The Justin Biebers of Minecraft Are Rewriting the Marketing Playbook

Just...

I hope you are deliberately lying about where this is still going on, otherwise why are you jeopardizing this potentially important operation by bragging about where you're conducting it? You are only inviting trouble from the thugs.

Would the downvoter care to come out of their dark corner and explain why I am wrong?

Not the downvoter and don't think it's worth a downvote but don't think the comment said anything not mentioned in (at least) the NY times article.

One other consideration: by posting their comment, they've leaked their ip address, which is a proxy for their location.

I've seen it on the BBC news. The place is swarming with activists and reporters. Its definitely not being done in secret.

I was unaware of the BBC (or any) major media coverage of this. It still worries me that this is going the route of "everybody look at this" to keep it secure. It does take a certain amount of trust among participants to go the route of "ok guys, we are going to handle these in a secret place until the job's done and we can distribute all at once," but the chosen route paints a very large bullseye on the operation.

I would imagine that it would not be hard for the police to justify a raid to reclaim classified documents, but maybe someone more familiar with the situation than myself could explain why this is less likely than my paranoid mind tells me?

The same activists who effectively just won the revolution are occupying the former president's residence, and have it open to the public. Journalists are everywhere. Said activists have the support of the military and the police and society at large. There's just no danger whatsoever of a raid, they can afford to be open. The thugs already lost.

That's very good news. Thank you for breaking it down for me!

> Said activists have the support of the military and the police and society at large.

Except in other parts of the country, Crimea for example, pro-Russian protesters are taking over government buildings and staging their own protests...

There's even talk of secession in Crimea...

The pro-EU activists may be a majority in some parts of Ukraine, but not in Ukraine at large...

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