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Exploring the Paramilitary Leaks

micahflee.com

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Re: Exploring the Paramilitary Leaks

#41

Post by neom »

Koffiepoeder wrote: post #37
neom wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly decent a prompt engineering I think, told it was for my art project of a creative writing class and I'd hidden 20 disturbing and nefarious things in the text (made sure to inject a fake murder into the text) - fake murder then a bunch of airsoft stuff, some psychological manipulation, and it oddly surfaced...some fb cookies, heh. 2mill tokens x3 runs

Have you tried querying for specific misconducts and let the LLM focus at one at a time? E.g. Find whether murders were planned or carried out, can you find any signs or plans of bomb-making, can you list all messages related to fire and arson, were any mass manipulation campaigns planned, etc, ... I have the feeling that would probably be more effective, not sure though.

Well my first query was "is there anything bad in here" and it basically said "no, it's a bunch of weirdos talking about guns, conspiracy theories and politics but there is nothing truly bad in there" - and then I went through a bunch of prompting for a while and very quickly got bored because at least what I was looking at, was just a bunch of americans talking about politics and guns.

Re: Exploring the Paramilitary Leaks

#42

Post by lukan »

mannyv wrote: post #35
DANmode wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search, in a browser? Feed it to a local model? If so: Wikileaks made/makes(?) all of their stuff easily browseable, "her emails" included.

You can search, but what do you search for if you don't know what's there?

"Evil plans of new world order" obviously..

It seems you want a AI to analyze the data in general?

Otherwise you will have to do some work and read a little bit .. and then investigate to see if there is more. That is where the search tools are useful. Like in the example, finding out if that Scott guy changed his opinion on the 6. of january after Trump became president. (To see if the original statement was a lie. Not possible with ease so far)

People will speak in code, if they are planning crimes. Only some idiots speak openly of violent revolution in public messengers.

Re: Exploring the Paramilitary Leaks

#43

Post by lukan »

lurk2 wrote: post #25
dskrvk wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guy is just walking us through the process of analyzing the dataset. He’s not really making any conclusions at this point - it’s like a technical tutorial for journalists.

[flagged]

No claim. Just a question that could not be answered yet, because the search tools are lacking. And this was about the search tools, not Scott.

Re: Exploring the Paramilitary Leaks

#44

Post by Animats »

What the louder militia members and gun nuts are up to is no secret. Most of that stuff is quite visible. You worry about the ones who organize quietly.

Here's "God, Family, and Guns", on YouTube.[1] This week, "What gun would Jesus carry?" (Answer: a 1911, the classic Army .45 automatic from 1911.)

Besides, Trump doesn't need an SA.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxFgFKxa3SD1WIZWmBRGEhg

Re: Exploring the Paramilitary Leaks

#45

Post by lurk2 »

diggan wrote: post #40
lurk2 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how many bigger groups of militarized anti-fascist groups exists today in the US? They tend to run largely independent scenes from city to city. You'll usually have anywhere from one to a dozen people acting as the core organizers of a given group. The groups range in size from around a dozen people to upwards of four hundred, depending on the city. Some cities might also have multiple groups active at a given time…

> It's quite rare for these groups to be truly "militarized." They often form violent mobs, but they rarely have any hierarchical structure beyond "leadership" (the organizers) and they don't generally make use of firearms. This has been changing in recent years; there have been a number of high-profile shootings involving Antifa-affiliated shooters. Quite a long answer overall that boils down to "No, they don't exis…

> Quite a long answer overall that boils down to "No, it doesn't exist" :)

It's not that simple. Leftists will discount what these groups did in 2020 but you're talking about a few dozen deaths and hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage. These groups are not "militias" in the way anyone would understand the term (namely, as an organized group training with firearms), but they are capable of terrorism at a tremendous scale. The difference is that their shootings tend to be spur of the moment (I can think of only one or two notable exceptions in the last ten years), whereas most right wing terrorism consists of spree killings conducted by a single killer.

> Even the non-extremists seems to have (to me) extremist opinions about guns, so I guess I'm kind of surprised only the far-right side got militarized compared to the left.

Gun culture in America is highly bifurcated. Urban whites in the areas that Antifa is most prevalent rarely own firearms. This has been changing as some of them are authentically worried that Trump is coming to put them in death camps, but most of the people involved in these groups are (to be frank) neurotic and lack both the desire and the temperament to operate firearms, so the trend doesn't really seem to have caught on. Historically, American leftists had no such aversion to firearms and were strongly in favor of the second amendment. These days, political tribalism in America is so extreme that you end up with really weird scenarios like people who are ostensibly anarchists making fun of libertarians for owning guns.

Re: Exploring the Paramilitary Leaks

#46

Post by [deleted] »

Animats wrote: post #44

What the louder militia members and gun nuts are up to is no secret. Most of that stuff is quite visible. You worry about the ones who organize quietly. Here's "God, Family, and Guns", on YouTube.[1] This week, "What gun would Jesus carry?" (Answer: a 1911, the classic Army .45 automatic from 1911.) Besides, Trump doesn't need an SA. [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxFgFKxa3SD1WIZWmBRGEhg

[deleted]

Re: Exploring the Paramilitary Leaks

#47

Post by lurk2 »

lukan wrote: post #43
lurk2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

No claim. Just a question that could not be answered yet, because the search tools are lacking. And this was about the search tools, not Scott.

Actually, you're right, he didn't explicitly state anything about Scot specifically, I just inferred it from his statement that the group chat "presumably" contained evidence of a crime.

> Also, at a glance at least, it appears that the bulk of it is idle chatter and conspiracy nonsense, presumably with evidence of crimes sprinkled in here or there. [...]

> Ahh, so he's the founder of American Patriot Three Percent, and here's his statement disavowing the violence from January 6, 2021. Looking at the metadata of this PDF, it was created on January 16, 2021. I wonder what Scot thinks about January 6 these days, after Trump was re-elected in 2024.

> In all likelihood, I can find out exactly what he thinks, because he probably posted about it to his militia buddies in Telegram, and it's probably in this dataset. The problem is, there's no easy way to quickly filter out messages from him, or even to tell which of these exported Telegram channels he was part of. I think that will be the first problem I solve.

While he doesn't come out and explicitly state: "Scot is lying about disavowing violence," I do think it's fairly obvious that this is what he's implying, given everything else he wrote.

Re: Exploring the Paramilitary Leaks

#48

Post by lurk2 »

hsshhshshjk wrote: post #18
roenxi wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not exactly hard-hitting journalism. But nonetheless fascinating. There are must be some really good PhD thesii written (to be written?) about how someone is supposed to handle this sort of data dump with modern tooling. It is a non-trivial general problem; we have a lot of really data floating around in public (Panama papers, relatively transparent government info, dumps of less transparent info at wikileaks.org,…

How about a whole book? > It's come to my attention that this dataset is rather challenging for journalists and researchers to wrap their heads around. I wrote a book, Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations, aimed at teaching journalists and researchers how to analyze datasets just like this.

I didn't even catch that on my first reading.

Re: Exploring the Paramilitary Leaks

#49

Post by diggan »

lurk2 wrote: post #45
diggan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's quite rare for these groups to be truly "militarized." They often form violent mobs, but they rarely have any hierarchical structure beyond "leadership" (the organizers) and they don't generally make use of firearms. This has been changing in recent years; there have been a number of high-profile shootings involving Antifa-affiliated shooters. Quite a long answer overall that boils down to "No, they don't exis…

> Quite a long answer overall that boils down to "No, it doesn't exist" :) It's not that simple. Leftists will discount what these groups did in 2020 but you're talking about a few dozen deaths and hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage. These groups are not "militias" in the way anyone would understand the term (namely, as an organized group training with firearms), but they are capable of terrorism at a…

> It's not that simple

I know you seemingly don't want it to appear that simple, but it really is. Original question was regarding organized and armed anti-fascist/far-left movements and if there was any investigation into those. Since we aren't organized, hierarchical (by design) nor armed/militarized, like the far-right, investigations into those are harder and AFAIK, haven't happened as of today.

If you have some concrete evidence for those investigations existing and being published on the open internet, feel free to link those.

Otherwise this conversation kind of lost track of it's original topic, as you're somehow dragging into "urban white rarely owning firearms" which might be true or not, but not sure how it's related to the topic at hand. Your language is also starting to become emotional and colorful enough for me (and others) to recognize that we're spilling into sharing anecdotal and personal experiences/beliefs, rather than talking hard concrete data and events.

Re: Exploring the Paramilitary Leaks

#50

Post by lukan »

pc86 wrote: post #8
bawolff wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > This is much more readable – but still, I don't think I can bring myself to sit down and read 77 pages of these messages right now. And that's just this one export of this one Telegram channel. 77 pages isn't that much in the scheme of thing. A court case having 77 pages of evidence would be entirely normal.

And let's be honest 77 pages of telegram chats would probably take 15 or 20 minutes to read. It's not exactly Proust.

Depends. Most of Telegram is indeed shallow. But some of my groups are occupied by people with a competition of who can write the longest and convulted essays of deep philosophical and political issues.
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