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GitHub and Medium take down database of ICE employee LinkedIn accounts

theverge.com

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Re: GitHub and Medium take down database of ICE employee LinkedIn accounts

#41

Post by Ntrails »

TravelTechGuy wrote: post #28

So the author copied data from one Microsoft site (LinkedIn) to another Microsoft site (GitHub). Both sites use PII to target people and companies: how many annoying emails have you received from LinkedIn this week? And I mean the creepy ones, suggesting contacts based on minute details from your profile, or encouraging you to import all your contacts so they can be spammed? But I guess if a user does it, it’s doxxin…

> I mean the creepy ones, suggesting contacts based on minute details from your profile, or encouraging you to import all your contacts so they can be spammed?

None at all. The only emails I get from linkedin are friend requests and message notifications. That's how I set the thing up.

I'm not sure that's super creepy?

Re: GitHub and Medium take down database of ICE employee LinkedIn accounts

#42

Post by eucitizen »

zaarn wrote: post #32

> The database included information like job title, profile picture, and general location of work. Ah, yes. The White Knight of Severely Violating People's Privacy because You're Right and They Aren't. Truly the most moral person in the world. In the current political situation in the US, afai can judge it, will enable harassers to seriously harm or even endanger the lives of these people for the crime of having the…

a) the eu is not a country

b) it certainly is not illegal in germany, france

ah, my other comment got flagged immediately. what a shame, @dang

Re: GitHub and Medium take down database of ICE employee LinkedIn accounts

#43

Post by eucitizen »

zaarn wrote: post #32

> The database included information like job title, profile picture, and general location of work. Ah, yes. The White Knight of Severely Violating People's Privacy because You're Right and They Aren't. Truly the most moral person in the world. In the current political situation in the US, afai can judge it, will enable harassers to seriously harm or even endanger the lives of these people for the crime of having the…

also: do you know how many SS and SA guys answered w a variation of “i was just following orders” / “i was just doing my job” after WW2? following immoral orders and executing them does not free you from consequences of your action.

Re: GitHub and Medium take down database of ICE employee LinkedIn accounts

#44

Post by eucitizen »

azertyxxx wrote: post #8

For the sake of completeness and putting moral questions aside, what is currently the best way to publish similarly questionable information in a hard-to-censor way?

IPFS

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmfBDkAQhgVd1nbREXGocVJr48jLp42zX8gEJKg...

Re: GitHub and Medium take down database of ICE employee LinkedIn accounts

#45

Post by mad_tortoise »

zaarn wrote: post #32

> The database included information like job title, profile picture, and general location of work. Ah, yes. The White Knight of Severely Violating People's Privacy because You're Right and They Aren't. Truly the most moral person in the world. In the current political situation in the US, afai can judge it, will enable harassers to seriously harm or even endanger the lives of these people for the crime of having the…

If you sign up to be in the police, or ICE, or any such governmental arm used to jail the poor and protect the rich, and are passively accepting these policies you are supporting them. As such by supporting these despicable policies those enforcing them are scum in my books, and if they are doing these things I see nothing wrong with publishing their information. Maybe now they will be as afraid as the people they persecute.

Re: GitHub and Medium take down database of ICE employee LinkedIn accounts

#46

Post by mad_tortoise »

staticelf wrote: post #26

So if I get this correct; this person wrote a program to gather information about individuals that may or may not be responsible for things related to the government agency and published that list with the intent that people who are angry about that should do what exactly? Contact them? Threat them? Stalk them? I see no other possible outcome of this action. Either you: 1. Don't care 2. Use this information in a bad…

I support the people who do these things, as I think they should live in the same amount of fear as those that they unfairly persecute. They are all complicit in the acts of violence and oppression against innocent civilians. The capitalist system, especially in the USA is designed to oppress the poor and protect the rich. It does this through the use of agencies like ICE. Pretend it's not true, but the facts over the past century overwhelmingly speak for themselves.

Re: GitHub and Medium take down database of ICE employee LinkedIn accounts

#47

Post by qbaqbaqba »

donbright wrote: post #11

Q "But don't we sell the same kind of data to our paying customers?" X "Yes, but when we do it, it's not doxxing" Q "Why not?" X "Because we would never do it for any nefarious reason" Q "What about that time we scraped the data of those groups that were linked to that reporter, so that one company could do oppo research and prepare a PR counterattack, targeting specific journalists" X "That wasn't nefarious. We made…

Are you referring to the Facebook-Cambridge Analytics controversy?

Re: GitHub and Medium take down database of ICE employee LinkedIn accounts

#48

Post by SauciestGNU »

Animats wrote: post #10

And now the Verge article has been scrubbed of the link to the Gitlab copy of the "ice-linkedin" repository. The real casualty here is going to be Linkedin. They don't publicize much how easily their data can be acquired in bulk.

You mean the repo that can be found here[0] for the curious?

[0] https://gitlab.com/marge_innovera/ice-linkedin/

Re: GitHub and Medium take down database of ICE employee LinkedIn accounts

#49

Post by zdragnar »

JetSpiegel wrote: post #35
zdragnar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throwing it in a git repository ensures that every person who clones it can readily republish it. Hosting said repository on Github, when anticipating an utterly massive spike in traffic, is an easy way to not have to pay for said spike in traffic (either from provisioning or data transfer). I didn't look at what format the "database" is in, or if the size would make it (im)practical to simply zip it up and email it…

Why not host the repo on his site? At least a read only copy. `git clone --bare` is enough.

Git itself was a bit of a red herring, even though it was somewhat relevant to that specific point. I know nothing about what hosting platform the author is currently using, so to make a quick assumption:

- hosting on AWS is not free for super high traffic (assuming the free tier can't keep up) - serving files from S3 is not free (though it's cheap enough at low read levels, it adds up)

At a typical level of traffic, the author's current host may be sufficiently inexpensive. Assuming the author was assuming many, many times the usual traffic (even if everyone is kind enough to bare clone), it would be a pointless expense.

Of course, third party hosting can take the content down... and this is where git became relevant. Assuming the author was more interested in distributing the content than the prestige of being the distributor, even though Github etc. took down the repo, every person who has since cloned is now capable of re-publishing to any new upstream repository of their choosing, on any server.

Assuming, again, that all of this was the goal, it probably made sense to utilize the free, fast, scalable third party hosting as long as possible rather than risk self-hosting slowing down or collapsing under traffic, or creating a massive spike in cost.

That's a whole boat load of assumptions, any of which could be wrong. In the realm of possible motivations, though, I think it's a fairly logical conclusion.

Re: GitHub and Medium take down database of ICE employee LinkedIn accounts

#50

Post by exegete »

mad_tortoise wrote: post #45
zaarn wrote: post #32

> The database included information like job title, profile picture, and general location of work. Ah, yes. The White Knight of Severely Violating People's Privacy because You're Right and They Aren't. Truly the most moral person in the world. In the current political situation in the US, afai can judge it, will enable harassers to seriously harm or even endanger the lives of these people for the crime of having the…

If you sign up to be in the police, or ICE, or any such governmental arm used to jail the poor and protect the rich, and are passively accepting these policies you are supporting them. As such by supporting these despicable policies those enforcing them are scum in my books, and if they are doing these things I see nothing wrong with publishing their information. Maybe now they will be as afraid as the people they pe…

What if you're an law enforcement agent and do your job ethically (refuse unethical orders, etc.)? Or what if you're pressured by your supervisor to do things that unethical and know that the consequence of not doing those things is getting your and your family's lives ruined? Should your private info be exposed so you can be harassed?
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