Malign Influence Operations Safari Continues

Q2 is over but we've still got torpedos in the water.

Ninety days ago when I published Malign Influence Operations Safari I had no idea that something so momentous as MIOS: Iran’s PressTV would happen so quickly. Then we closed out the quarter with MIOS Goes To Michigan, a surprise preservation request.

What’s still moving out there?

MIOS Russpublicans is in the hands of someone quite capable, but I fear that just to the nature of things it won’t get past an editor. I wish we had something else to throw on the pile, it’s just not enough for a bonfire(yet).

There was something interesting in the Trump FEC data, which was found and dispatched to the appropriate entity roughly nine months ago. Now I hear maybe it’s going to be an article where I get some credit. If I had to choose between landing a hit and getting name checked somewhere, gimme the direct effect every time.

The world is chock full of data leaks. There are two of them that got quietly processed in Q1/Q2 and I’ll never get credit, but I’m delighted none the less. There is another big one that was going around, the goods are secured, but it’s not something for Disinfodrome. At least not without expanding the service from document indexing into other areas. I’ll get credit for analytical work thanks to the person who sourced the material and there are a number of follow on reporting opportunities from it as well.

Racking my brain here in the East Bay’s cool night air, I also recall there’s a FOIA thing in there that’s been going since last winter. This was the first time someone else dragged a kill home, then asked me to help cut it up. All prior curation work for OSS was done on my initiative. I’m not sure how this is going to play out - we have about 60k documents, it’s the hundred or so deemed privileged that would really illuminate things, and the agencies are resisting.

Conclusion:

Disinfodrome is just sitting over there, waiting for curious people to log in and look around, which I can see from the logs they are doing from time to time. I need to get back into Pycharm, and once the cleanup code is a bit more functional I’ll go back to Docker and resume scaling the OpenLDAP learning cliff. There are a lot of analytical problems in leaks/FOIAs where a simple directory of who’s who that can be used via a web interface AND accessed for batch processing would greatly facilitate things.

So while MIOS as a focus is over, like the song says, “we’re on surfari to stay”, and any time one of these long term investments pays off I’ll be back with an after action report.