GPS metadata from videos posted to Parler on Jan. 6 shows several users deep inside the Capitol; source: FBI has expressed interest in examining the data
At least several users of the far-right social network Parler appear to be among the hoard of rioters that managed to penetrate deep inside …
Gizmodo
Context & Ripple Effects
This story lands one day after a researcher reported she had archived 99.9% of Parler's posts, many carrying location data, just as Apple, Google, and Amazon pulled the service offline. The archive was framed then as a preservation effort; today's report turns it into an evidentiary one, with GPS coordinates from user videos placing several posters deep inside the Capitol and the FBI signaling interest in the dataset.
First-order effects
Parler users who filmed inside the Capitol now face identification through their own uploads' GPS metadata, giving FBI investigators a self-incriminating trail that requires no warrant against the platform — which no longer exists to resist one.
Second-order effects
The case joins a growing evidentiary stack: federal docs show the FBI pairing this with license plate readers and facial recognition (per later filings), while prosecutors have already built 45 criminal cases on Google geofence geolocation placing suspects inside the building — location data is becoming the backbone of Jan. 6 prosecution rather than a supplement.
Third-order effects
Amateur sleuths running facial recognition over the same Parler videos show the archive is being mined outside law enforcement too; if the pattern holds, taking a platform offline no longer destroys its records — third-party archives and commercial geolocation databases become the durable surveillance layer, raising the stakes of the public-data permission boundary debate.
The trend: Platform takedowns are proving hollow as evidence strategy: user-generated location data survives in independent archives and commercial geolocation systems, making every post a potential future exhibit.
GPS Data from the Parler shows Trump supporters went deep inside the Capitol: https://gizmodo.com/... That's shocking, but not surprising. Here's a post from The Donald calling for exactly that. More on the online planning here: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... https://twitter.c…
“Gizmodo has mapped nearly 70,000 geo-located Parler posts and on Tuesday isolated hundreds published on January 6 near the Capitol where a mob of pro-Trump supporters had hoped to overturn a democratic election and keep their president in power.” A+ job https://twitter.com/...
Bwaaahahahahahahaha... The best part is that anybody with half a brain could have seen this coming a mile away, given that the site was a hotbed of extremists that required ID to register and with incredibly lax security standards. https://twitter.com/...
What sets the line between scraping personal data to catch violent criminals, vs. scraping it for sketchy purposes like building facial recognition databases? As a practical matter, the ethics of individual technologists like this one. https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/…
there are multiple efforts right now to identify Parler users who were at the Capitol Hill riots using metadata pulled from the archives https://www.vice.com/...
Parler users breached deep inside the U.S. Capitol, as shown by GPS data pulled from videos archived by @donk_enby just before Amazon's takedown. https://gizmodo.com/...
The Parler game: “Massive numbers of posts that discussed the insurrection before, during, and after it was carried out will be preserved indefinitely so that they're available to researchers, journalists, prosecutors, and others.” https://arstechnica.com/...
A Reddit rumor was going around yesterday that hackers downloaded nearly all of Parler's data with a 2fa bug that let anyone create an admin account. Yes, hackers grabbed all of Parler's (public) data. But the truth of how they did it was far simpler: https://www.wired.com/...
Parler lacked the most basic security measures that would have prevented the automated scraping of the site's data Haven for hate speech Haven for data's grab https://www.wired.com/...
Reminder: the FBI generally has to use actual legal process to obtain information about people. This is a good thing, even when the people in question are insurrectionists. https://twitter.com/...
Great @a_greenberg summary of what went down at Parler yesterday. No, it wasn't a hack. Yes, it was just as bad. Parler doesn't “harvest personal data,” was Matze's pitch. [Narrator: It did]. https://twitter.com/...
Insecure direct object reference by using sequential/incrementing ID values for content that can easily be guessed & downloaded. This class of bug has been in and out the OWASP top 10 for years but we come across it on a weekly basis during assessments. https://twitter.com/...
the reddit story about 2fa bypass and admin accounts was completely bogus. the real truth is: - iterable post IDs that were 100% public and open to everyone - literally exactly what weev did (fucking ironic, no?) - only public posts were scraped/archived. https://twitter.com/...
“This is as bad as it gets,” White says. “It's gross incompetence on the part of Parler. They marketed themselves as a private, secure, unmoderated platform, and instead it's comedy hour.” https://www.wired.com/...
Helpful that the app intensely concerned with user privacy was not stripping any metadata from what users uploaded, making it by far the most law enforcement investigation friendly social platform yet https://twitter.com/...