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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   6140 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 21, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Yeah, it's very normal OSINT procedure to write long investigations of Russian spook units based on Russian phone metadata, which is very open source information, really it is. Procuring restricted data in bulk from a hostile foreign country, it's just as 'open' as reading newspapers or looking up things on commercial satelite maps.

This is how Bellingcat describe their methods and sources:

https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2020/12/14/navalny-fsb-methodology/

Russia’s Data Market

Much of the information we used for our investigations could never be found in most Western countries, but in Russia, is readily available either for free or a fairly modest fee. Additionally, Russian email providers, such as Mail.ru and Rambler, and social networks, such as Vkontakte, are far less secure and privacy-focused than their Western equivalents, leading to frequent data leaks and robust search functions.

Due to porous data protection measures in Russia, it only takes some creative Googling (or Yandexing) and a few hundred euros worth of cryptocurrency to be fed through an automated payment platform, not much different than Amazon or Lexis Nexis, to acquire telephone records with geolocation data, passenger manifests, and residential data. For the records contained within multi-gigabyte database files that are not already floating around the internet via torrent networks, there is a thriving black market to buy and sell data. The humans who manually fetch this data are often low-level employees at banks, telephone companies, and police departments. Often, these data merchants providing data to resellers or direct to customers are caught and face criminal charges. For other batches of records, there are automated services either within websites or through bots on the Telegram messaging service that entirely circumvent the necessity of a human conduit to provide sensitive personal data.

For example, to find a huge collection of personal information for Anatoliy Chepiga — one of the two GRU officers involved in the poisoning of Sergey Skripal and his daughter — we only need to use a Telegram bot and about 10 euros. Within 2-3 minutes of entering Chepiga’s full name and providing a credit card via Google Pay or a payment service like Yandex Money, a popular Telegram bot will provide us with Chepiga’s date of birth, passport number, court records, license plate number, VIN number, previous vehicle ownership history, traffic violations, and frequent parking locations in Moscow. A sample of the baseline information provided can be seen below, with key personal details censored.

It might be hard to believe at first, but after observing some recent events, it is not so hard anymore to believe that Russia is really so incompetent and corrupt to the very core.

Well, maybe. (I'm giving it a maybe bc Russians are kind of special)

It's also hard to believe that anyone believes the official Skripal narrative when the fact that makes the mainstream narrative an obvious red herring is on the bloody wikpedia page.

How many paramedics, nurses and doctors are there in the United Kingdom ? 50,000? 100,000 ?

And it just so happens that the he gets poisoned by the Russian so fortuitously so that when he passes out he is found by probably the most politically reliable nurse in the entire country.

/images/16856176137822983.webp

It's also hard to believe that anyone believes the official Skripal narrative when the fact that makes the mainstream narrative an obvious red herring is on the bloody wikpedia page.

Yes, this whole story was sus when it happened, and hadn't improved with age.

The Skripal Case 5 Years On summarized

but the investigation in Russian sources in not the most implausible part.

Can confirm, got such a database on one New Year as a high schooler, from my dad. This is very normal.

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