The Parler U.S. Capitol Riot Video Archive
Before Parler was closed down (for now anyway) some hackers downloaded almost the entirety of the site. Vice has the story [c]:
Donk_enby had originally intended to grab data only from the day of the Capitol takeover, but found that the poor construction and security of Parler allowed her to capture, essentially, the entire website. That ended up being 56.7 terabytes of data, which included every public post on Parler, 412 million files in all—including 150 million photos and more than 1 million videos. Each of these had embedded metadata like date, time and GPS coordinates—unlike most social media sites, Parler does not strip metadata from media its users upload, which, crucially, could be useful for law enforcement and open source investigators.
I’m no SysAdmin but surely one of the first things you do if you run a web service which lets users upload media is to make sure that you strip the EXIF data. It’s hilarious that Parler didn’t do this.
Anyway all this data is useful in identifying crimes that were done during the recent riot in the U.S. capitol [[c](https://cdn.clowes.org/cached/2021/2021 storming of the United States Capitol - Wikipedia.html)] as many of the rioters were Parler users.
But the vast majority of video on Parler had nothing to do with the riot. So ProPublica have done the legwork [[c](https://cdn.clowes.org/cached/2021/Why We Published More Than 500 Videos Taken by Parler Users of the Capitol Riot — ProPublica.html)] and released an archive of around 500 videos from the riot itself. All neatly organised too (unlike the rioters).
You can view them all here. It’s fascinating stuff.
Share:Related: 'Woman Is Sentenced to 43 Years for Criticizing Thai Monarchy'