Aggregation of 500+ Insurrection Videos

Unless you live under a rock, or choose to live in a media bubble filled with lies and misinformation, you should be aware that after the violent mob attacked the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, the ‘unfiltered’ social media site Parler was also taken offline by Apple, Google, and Amazon. In addition, a social activist hacker who was thinking quickly downloaded practically all the activity that was posted to the service.

Operating on little sleep, @donk_enby began the work of archiving all of Parler’s posts, ultimately capturing around 99.9 percent of its content. In a tweet early Sunday, @donk_enby said she was crawling some 1.1 million Parler video URLs. “These are the original, unprocessed, raw files as uploaded to Parler with all associated metadata,” she said. Included in this data tranche, now more than 56 terabytes in size, @donk_enby confirmed that the raw video files include GPS metadata pointing to exact locations of where the videos were taken.

Gizmodo

After that, all this amazingly valuable and incriminating information was released and from there, the folks at Pro Publica sifted through all the videos that were posted to Parler, pulled out about 500+ of the most relevant ones, and aggregated them by the time they were shot and the location that they were shot at. The result is a chronological mash up of all these videos from about Noon on January 6th through to 6pm.

Pro Publica had access to this ‘meta’ information because Parler uploaded the raw files to their servers – meaning all the original ‘meta data’ attached to the videos such as time and location – and this information was still there and attached to these videos.

I’m sure this will be very valuable information for law enforcement.

A Call To Sanity

Image Credit: NY Times

I have to wonder if Pelosi’s smart move to hold submission of the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate will maybe make those in the GOP to take a step back and really think about what they have in front of them. Maybe when others in the GOP start to vocalize a strikingly logical perspective, like what Jeff Flake penned in the WaPost, some sense of sanity will start to sink in. Or does nothing truly matter anymore?

But what is indefensible is echoing House Republicans who say that the president has not done anything wrong. He has.

The willingness of House Republicans to bend to the president’s will by attempting to shift blame with the promotion of bizarre and debunked conspiracy theories has been an appalling spectacle. It will have long-term ramifications for the country and the party, to say nothing of individual reputations. 

Nearly all of you condemned the president’s behavior during the 2016 campaign. Nearly all of you refused to campaign with him. You knew then that doing so would be wrong — would be a stain on your reputation and the standing of the Republican Party, and would do lasting damage to the conservative cause.

Ask yourself today: Has the president changed his behavior? Has he grown in office? Has the mantle of the presidency altered his conduct? The answer is obvious. In fact, if the president’s political rally in Michigan on Wednesday is any measure, his language has only become more vulgar, his performance cruder, his behavior more boorish and unstable.

Jeff Flake, OpEd, The Washington Post – 12.21.19