TBH I wouldn't be surprised if these organizations are infested with FBI agents.

• lurk2

  today at 7:43 AM

  Both organizations have had reputations for being honeypots as early as 2016. There have been a number of instances of federal agents becoming embedded in the organizational structures of groups like this (see e.g. the Malheur Wildlife Standoff and the plot to assassinate Gretchen Whitmer). Groups of this scale tend to fall into one of three categories: 1) They are honeypots set up by policing and / or intelligence agencies, 2) they start off as legitimate (though potentially not-yet radicalized) organizations that are compromised by a member turning informant when the radicalization begins to alarm them, or 3) they start off as radical organizations and are compromised after a federal agency threatens the leadership with jail time or influences them into becoming informants. It's quite common for the FBI to frame this as "helping to keep people safe"; leaders in groups like this are frequently easy to manipulate with flattery.

  • noneeeed

    today at 8:56 AM

    I've been struck by how often it is really quite senior people within criminal/terrorist organisations are the ones that get turned by the various agencies.

    In the UK, there was an informant for MI5 in the IRA for years codenamed Steaknife. It turned out he was the head of IRA internal security, it was his job to hunt moles. He was the perfect agent. I seem to remember a story of a mafia don who turned out to be an informant, which seems wild to me.

    • boomboomsubban

      today at 9:48 AM

      > I seem to remember a story of a mafia don who turned out to be an informant, which seems wild to me.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_Bulger

• wildzzz

  today at 4:47 AM

  Even the small group that tried to kidnap Whitmer had a suspected 12 informants and agents (3 confirmed informants, 2 agents) in the group.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_pl...

  • thinkingemote

    today at 7:36 AM

    It's also worth pointing out that this pattern is kind of common. As here, these agents are often at the very top. Almost all Organisations of Interest will be compromised at the leadership level.

    It's something most grass roots activists don't feel intuitively at all.

    They look for spies among their own level but it's almost always going to be the organisers, the helpers, the ones with the van, the one that can print your posters, the one with a bit of spare cash, the dude who can set up your server and the friendly friend with time to help you personally that are the spies.

    Logically it makes sense for a spy to be placed as high as possible to get more information, and yet activists look for spies among the rank and file. They look for odd people to label as the spy. They expel the outsider. They suspect the ones that don't fit in. But the spy is going to be a well adjusted normal insider that they already trust, almost always!

    I find it so interesting. It happens again and again. It's probably the same pattern for any group that attracts any government attention.

    • noneeeed

      today at 9:01 AM

      As I mentioned in another comment, one of the most amazing examples of this was the British Army/MI5 mole inside the IRA, Freddie Scappaticci, codenamed Steaknife. He was a leading member of the IRA's internal security team.

      It really feels counterintuitive that someone who has got to the top would be the one to turn, but it also makes sense that they would be the one's targetted.

      • mariusor

        today at 9:45 AM

        I have no information about this specific case, but generally speaking I think that it would be in their best interests for an intelligence agency to push their asset to the top of the org through any means in order to maximise their impact, so, at least to me, it seems plausible that many of the people at the top are informants.

  • notahacker

    today at 9:02 AM

    Basically the plot of The Man Who Was Thursday

• sixothree

  today at 4:48 AM

  I would be less surprised if it were the other way around.

• bigbacaloa

  today at 7:08 AM

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• mjfl

  today at 4:55 AM

  Considering that: (1) the US has covertly supported al-Qaeda, to the point of enabling an offshoot, HTS, to control Syria, (2) the US has covertly supported a right wing Azov battalion that Time magazine and Vice ran stories on as part of a 'rise in global right wing terror' only to turn around and support them and whitewash them in the war against Ukraine, (3) ISIS-K attacking Iran and Russia instead of Israel, (4) heads of major right wing orgs like the Proud Boys being FBI informants (Richie Torres), I would say your statement is plausible.

  • wildzzz

    today at 5:03 AM

    Sometimes the enemy of your enemy is your friend, other times they are just another enemy. Playing both sides does sometimes get messy but that's the next generation's problem.

    • mjfl

      today at 5:20 AM

      It's pretty disgusting to demand a domestic crackdown on your political opponents because of the 'threat' posed by an extremist group that you are covertly funding, training, and controlling, which is what happened with Azov.

      • idiotsecant

        today at 5:44 AM

        What domestic crackdown are you talking about, specifically?

        • mjfl

          today at 6:27 AM

          The crackdown on Trump supporters after his 2016 election.

          https://archive.ph/uJR8h

          • forgetfreeman

            today at 8:48 AM

            A bunch of claims made there with no evidence supplied to support any of them, and especially nothing linking domestic terrorism with run of the mill Trump supporters, although it's quite telling that one would make that conceptual leap, ostensibly to fuel some sense of personal grievance?

            Based on first hand experience on the fringes of white supremacist organizations over the decades I'm totally unsurprised to hear law enforcement would have a hard time finding them in bulk as the percentage of people in the US who willingly harbor these kinds of views is a rounding error compared to the larger populace. It's actually pretty shocking how much trouble such a small group of people can cause on the rare occasion that they either muster the courage of their convictions and act on their beliefs or are goaded into action by law enforcement plants. In any case, trivializing these groups, either by dismissing their numbers or by trying to reframe them as mere "political opposition" is deeply stupid. These people are profoundly dangerous.

            • mjfl

              today at 9:09 AM

              A gave you an article with a letter from a congressman that was part of an investigation into exactly this behavior.

              It's not my job to educate you. I'm not writing out a research essay for you, on hacker news. Figure it out yourself, read a book. And go fuck yourself while you're at it.

              • forgetfreeman

                today at 9:13 AM

                What your job is depends on your goals I suppose. If your goal is to convince or persuade then yes, your job absolutely is to educate me as I'm at least willing to meet your claims with enough curiosity to examine the material you present to support them.

                What's really wild here is I honestly have no idea what you're angry about, and I am deeply curious as to the cause.

What the louder militia members and gun nuts are up to is no secret. Most of that stuff is quite visible. You worry about the ones who organize quietly.

Here's "God, Family, and Guns", on YouTube.[1] This week, "What gun would Jesus carry?" (Answer: a 1911, the classic Army .45 automatic from 1911.)

Besides, Trump doesn't need an SA.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxFgFKxa3SD1WIZWmBRGEhg

• today at 8:11 AM

With a big dump like this, the Disney one, Clinton's emails, efc - what would you want to be able to do?

• DANmode

  today at 6:54 AM

  Search, in a browser?

  Feed it to a local model?

  If so: Wikileaks made/makes(?) all of their stuff easily browseable, "her emails" included.

  • mannyv

    today at 7:29 AM

    You can search, but what do you search for if you don't know what's there?

    • Cthulhu_

      today at 8:26 AM

      If you don't know what's there you just start from the top I suppose. That's what happened with the Snowden leaks, they were picked apart over the span of months if not years by journalists, publishing what they found was interesting.

    • lukan

      today at 8:00 AM

      "Evil plans of new world order" obviously..

      It seems you want a AI to analyze the data in general?

      Otherwise you will have to do some work and read a little bit .. and then investigate to see if there is more. That is where the search tools are useful. Like in the example, finding out if that Scott guy changed his opinion on the 6. of january after Trump became president. (To see if the original statement was a lie. Not possible with ease so far)

      People will speak in code, if they are planning crimes. Only some idiots speak openly of violent revolution in public messengers.

In a dump like this, why would anyone truat that any given part of it is authentic? I could tell some great lies by embedding disinformation in a disseminated data dump like this.

• somenameforme

  today at 6:44 AM

  Skimming a fair chunk of it by hand (and some others have run it through LLMs) it seems extremely mundane. I also find the publisher's claims that he "[just can't] bring [him]self to sit down and read 77 pages of these messages right now" implausible. He's self promoting like crazy, is/was a professional reporter, and 77 pages of sparsely spaced telegram chats is like 30 minutes of reading. If there was some big story awaiting in those 77 pages (or the entire leak for that matter) he'd, with 100% certainty, want to be the one breaking it.

  So it's most likely just going to be an insight into a different culture/worldview, like reading e.g. /r/anarchism. In many ways this is also the same with the Clinton leaks. Unless one was just horrifically naive of how politics works, there was nothing particularly exceptional in it. The really wild stuff came from interpreting messages as having coded meanings.

  • Cthulhu_

    today at 8:33 AM

    77 pages of messages sounds like it's only a small percentage of communication in that group. I can imagine (also based on other comments about organizations like this being infiltrated by law enforcement) their communication networks are a lot more involved than Telegram chats or other "honeypotable" systems. Snowden revealed (or confirmed our suspicions that) the NSA has backdoor access to all major American based social media / communications, and the media broke at least twice about a major 'encrypted' chat / secure phone provider being compromised causing hundreds if not thousands of arrests worldwide.

    (note: arrests, because whether the chats were recorded legally and are admissable to court is a whole different matter)

  • sangnoir

    today at 8:39 AM

    > I also find the publisher's claims that he "[just can't] bring [him]self to sit down and read 77 pages of these messages right now" implausible.

    Read back a few sentences for the context - they aren't willing to ready 77 pages just to seek/isolate messages from one individual around a specific topic. I would expect a journalist to do this repeatedly for multiple individuals, so it makes sense to parse the data and make it queryable without having to read through hundreds/thousands of telegrams just to capture a few dozen

• Cthulhu_

  today at 8:28 AM

  "Trust, but verify". In this case, none of this is admissable in court (assuming there IS anything illegal in here, I haven't finished reading beyond people selling merch) because it wasn't done by the book, but it can give enough leads for further investigation, like marking people as "person of interest", cross referencing with other known activities by the people involved, etc. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction.

> This is why this dataset is hard to wrap your head around: there's just sooo much here. It would take a ridiculous amount of time to try to manually read through it all. Also, at a glance at least, it appears that the bulk of it is idle chatter and conspiracy nonsense, presumably with evidence of crimes sprinkled in here or there.

Not exactly hard-hitting journalism. He then goes on to speculate that Scot Seddon's disavowal of the January 6th protests was disingenuous, and that his true feelings would be revealed in chat logs after Trump was re-elected. But:

> This is much more readable – but still, I don't think I can bring myself to sit down and read 77 pages of these messages right now. And that's just this one export of this one Telegram channel.

So the guy complaining about conspiracy theories goes on to invent his own despite having access to potentially corroborative data that he simply can't be bothered to read.

• dskrvk

  today at 3:40 AM

  The guy is just walking us through the process of analyzing the dataset. He’s not really making any conclusions at this point - it’s like a technical tutorial for journalists.

  • lurk2

    today at 6:43 AM

    Did he or did he not make the (thus far unfounded) claim that Scot Seddon's condemnation of political violence was insincere?

    • lukan

      today at 8:02 AM

      No claim. Just a question that could not be answered yet, because the search tools are lacking. And this was about the search tools, not Scott.

      • lurk2

        today at 8:14 AM

        Actually, you're right, he didn't explicitly state anything about Scot specifically, I just inferred it from his statement that the group chat "presumably" contained evidence of a crime.

        > Also, at a glance at least, it appears that the bulk of it is idle chatter and conspiracy nonsense, presumably with evidence of crimes sprinkled in here or there. [...]

        > Ahh, so he's the founder of American Patriot Three Percent, and here's his statement disavowing the violence from January 6, 2021. Looking at the metadata of this PDF, it was created on January 16, 2021. I wonder what Scot thinks about January 6 these days, after Trump was re-elected in 2024.

        > In all likelihood, I can find out exactly what he thinks, because he probably posted about it to his militia buddies in Telegram, and it's probably in this dataset. The problem is, there's no easy way to quickly filter out messages from him, or even to tell which of these exported Telegram channels he was part of. I think that will be the first problem I solve.

        While he doesn't come out and explicitly state: "Scot is lying about disavowing violence," I do think it's fairly obvious that this is what he's implying, given everything else he wrote.

    • akdor1154

      today at 7:45 AM

      That wasn't my reading. My reading was that it was a natural question for someone to try and find in the dataset, so would serve well as a motivating example.

      Yes it's politically sensitive, but it's going to be difficult to find motivating examples in this dataset that aren't.

• roenxi

  today at 3:40 AM

  > Not exactly hard-hitting journalism.

  But nonetheless fascinating. There are must be some really good PhD thesii written (to be written?) about how someone is supposed to handle this sort of data dump with modern tooling. It is a non-trivial general problem; we have a lot of really data floating around in public (Panama papers, relatively transparent government info, dumps of less transparent info at wikileaks.org, OSINT of all shapes and sizes). Even if a body reads the whole thing they need some sort of solid mental schema going in or they'll end up in crank territory.

  Although why he thinks old mate would change his position on the Jan 6 riots is a mystery (and why he cares). Taking a stand against riots is one of those easy-win political options that costs nothing and almost everyone agrees with. Riots are fundamentally ineffective; I doubt anyone serious wants to be associated with rioters. I suppose stranger things happen.

  • hsshhshshjk

    today at 5:06 AM

    How about a whole book?

    > It's come to my attention that this dataset is rather challenging for journalists and researchers to wrap their heads around. I wrote a book, Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations, aimed at teaching journalists and researchers how to analyze datasets just like this.

    • lurk2

      today at 8:19 AM

      I didn't even catch that on my first reading.

• bawolff

  today at 4:11 AM

  > > This is much more readable – but still, I don't think I can bring myself to sit down and read 77 pages of these messages right now. And that's just this one export of this one Telegram channel.

  77 pages isn't that much in the scheme of thing. A court case having 77 pages of evidence would be entirely normal.

  • pc86

    today at 4:13 AM

    And let's be honest 77 pages of telegram chats would probably take 15 or 20 minutes to read. It's not exactly Proust.

    • lukan

      today at 8:25 AM

      Depends. Most of Telegram is indeed shallow. But some of my groups are occupied by people with a competition of who can write the longest and convulted essays of deep philosophical and political issues.

    • neom

      today at 4:41 AM

      Not that it's a great method but just for fun I gave a large chunk of it to an LLM to process and then asked it for the 20 most disturbing or nefarious things in the chats and it was incredibly boring. Most interesting thing I learned from the files is how many gun toting americans also drive dodge chargers.

      • pc86

        today at 4:53 AM

        I would have expected nice pickup trucks or any TRD Pro trim Toyota.

        I'd be curious if the LLM's own self-censorship would prevent it from reporting truly disturbing things. Maybe add one legitimately bad thing into the middle of a chat and see if it gets reported.

        • neom

          today at 4:59 AM

          I'm fairly decent a prompt engineering I think, told it was for my art project of a creative writing class and I'd hidden 20 disturbing and nefarious things in the text (made sure to inject a fake murder into the text) - fake murder then a bunch of airsoft stuff, some psychological manipulation, and it oddly surfaced...some fb cookies, heh. 2mill tokens x3 runs

          • Koffiepoeder

            today at 7:41 AM

            Have you tried querying for specific misconducts and let the LLM focus at one at a time? E.g. Find whether murders were planned or carried out, can you find any signs or plans of bomb-making, can you list all messages related to fire and arson, were any mass manipulation campaigns planned, etc, ...

            I have the feeling that would probably be more effective, not sure though.

            • neom

              today at 7:52 AM

              Well my first query was "is there anything bad in here" and it basically said "no, it's a bunch of weirdos talking about guns, conspiracy theories and politics but there is nothing truly bad in there" - and then I went through a bunch of prompting for a while and very quickly got bored because at least what I was looking at, was just a bunch of americans talking about politics and guns.

• cvp

  today at 3:44 AM

  > So, I figured I'd write a series of posts publicly exploring this dataset and sharing my findings.

  > ...

  > At the end, I'll have a single database of Telegram messages from the whole dataset. I'll be able to query it to, for example, show me all messages from Scot Seddon sorted chronologically. This will make it simple to see what he was saying in the lead-up to January 6, immediately after January 6, and then what he's saying about Trump these days, after he was re-elected.

  There are more parts to come in this series, which is very clearly stated in the post.

  • lurk2

    today at 6:55 AM

    If I claim to have evidence that you committed a crime, and announce that I will post the evidence later, should my claims be taken seriously, or dismissed?

    Even if he's right (and I'm not saying he isn't), this kind of behavior is inexcusable (though completely expected) coming from a guy who calls himself a journalist.

• WatchDog

  today at 5:12 AM

  The author of the blog post, Micah Lee, appears to be one of the directors of Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets)[0].

  DDoSecrets appears to be an anarchist/communist affiliated activist group.

  Basically you've got two groups from extreme sides of the political spectrum fighting each other, the Guy Fawkes LARPers upset about Jan 6 of all things, and the seal team 6 LARPers upset about "stolen" elections and ivermectin.

  [0]: https://ddosecrets.com/about

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• diggan

  today at 6:58 AM

  The source is https://ddosecrets.com/article/paramilitary-leaks which states

  > Over 200 gigabytes of chat logs and recordings from paramilitary groups and militias including American Patriots Three Percent (APIII) and the Oath Keepers

  So no, neither of those groups are anti-fascists (seemingly the opposite actually) or "far-left", and the resulting documentation is only from the groups the individual successfully infiltrated.

  Besides, how many bigger groups of militarized anti-fascist groups exists today in the US? I'm not from there, so don't know the situation, but from the outside it seems like mostly people on the right are the ones running the militias over there.

  • lurk2

    today at 7:17 AM

    > how many bigger groups of militarized anti-fascist groups exists today in the US?

    They tend to run largely independent scenes from city to city. You'll usually have anywhere from one to a dozen people acting as the core organizers of a given group. The groups range in size from around a dozen people to upwards of four hundred, depending on the city. Some cities might also have multiple groups active at a given time. I don't know what the scenes look like now but around 2018 I can remember at least two independent groups operating out of Portland, for example. These groups are usually no more than a phone tree of people they can mobilize for protests. Organizers may also be in contact with scenes from other cities; it's not uncommon for demonstrators to be bussed in to a protest from another city or state. It's quite rare for these groups to be truly "militarized." They often form violent mobs, but they rarely have any hierarchical structure beyond "leadership" (the organizers) and they don't generally make use of firearms. This has been changing in recent years; there have been a number of high-profile shootings involving Antifa-affiliated shooters.

    • diggan

      today at 7:51 AM

      > It's quite rare for these groups to be truly "militarized." They often form violent mobs, but they rarely have any hierarchical structure beyond "leadership" (the organizers) and they don't generally make use of firearms. This has been changing in recent years; there have been a number of high-profile shootings involving Antifa-affiliated shooters.

      Quite a long answer overall that boils down to "No, they don't exist" :)

      Would make sense if our friends in the US would also arm themselves, similar to militias on the right, but I wonder why that isn't the case? Even the non-extremists seems to have (to me) extremist opinions about guns, so I guess I'm kind of surprised only the far-right side got militarized compared to the left. I guess it gets a lot easier when you have more friends in the right (no pun intended) places.

      • lurk2

        today at 8:09 AM

        > Quite a long answer overall that boils down to "No, it doesn't exist" :)

        It's not that simple. Leftists will discount what these groups did in 2020 but you're talking about a few dozen deaths and hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage. These groups are not "militias" in the way anyone would understand the term (namely, as an organized group training with firearms), but they are capable of terrorism at a tremendous scale. The difference is that their shootings tend to be spur of the moment (I can think of only one or two notable exceptions in the last ten years), whereas most right wing terrorism consists of spree killings conducted by a single killer.

        > Even the non-extremists seems to have (to me) extremist opinions about guns, so I guess I'm kind of surprised only the far-right side got militarized compared to the left.

        Gun culture in America is highly bifurcated. Urban whites in the areas that Antifa is most prevalent rarely own firearms. This has been changing as some of them are authentically worried that Trump is coming to put them in death camps, but most of the people involved in these groups are (to be frank) neurotic and lack both the desire and the temperament to operate firearms, so the trend doesn't really seem to have caught on. Historically, American leftists had no such aversion to firearms and were strongly in favor of the second amendment. These days, political tribalism in America is so extreme that you end up with really weird scenarios like people who are ostensibly anarchists making fun of libertarians for owning guns.

        • diggan

          today at 8:22 AM

          > It's not that simple

          I know you seemingly don't want it to appear that simple, but it really is. Original question was regarding organized and armed anti-fascist/far-left movements and if there was any investigation into those. Since we aren't organized, hierarchical (by design) nor armed/militarized, like the far-right, investigations into those are harder and AFAIK, haven't happened as of today.

          If you have some concrete evidence for those investigations existing and being published on the open internet, feel free to link those.

          Otherwise this conversation kind of lost track of it's original topic, as you're somehow dragging into "urban white rarely owning firearms" which might be true or not, but not sure how it's related to the topic at hand. Your language is also starting to become emotional and colorful enough for me (and others) to recognize that we're spilling into sharing anecdotal and personal experiences/beliefs, rather than talking hard concrete data and events.

• 1617432028

  today at 7:01 AM

  I think that this is a leak of a particular right-wing group, not leaks of left-wing groups?

  What incident are you referring to where part of the US was occupied with automatic weapons? The closest thing I can think of is the Seattle CHOP/CHAZ/whatever the heck it's called. But AFAIK people there were only open carrying semi-automatic weapons, not fully automatic ones.

• bigbacaloa

  today at 7:07 AM

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