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We're joined tonight by Kyle. 
Over here. 
How are you doing? 
Over in Skypland, we have Rob T. 
Firefly. 
Good evening. 
We have Gila. 
Good evening. 
And we have Alex. 
Good evening as well. 
Okay. 
It's been an interesting week. 
Update on all the whole business we were talking about last week. 
We are still working on getting more people involved. 
But we've had some amazing meetings since last week with core organizers and staff people from all over the world. 
I realized, you know, I was worried last week that we weren't getting a stronger response as we're used to. 
But after having conferred with all the different people that we are so lucky to have working with us, it's going to be an awesome event regardless. 
No matter how many people are there or aren't there, we are going to have some incredible things going on. 
So looking forward to the conference coming up July 12th through the 14th at St. 
John's University, Hope XV, our 15th Hope Conference, Hope Being Hackers on Planet Earth. 
There's going to be more information tomorrow on the 2600.com webpage. 
And also, if you go to that webpage, you'll see a link on the top of it right now that will take you to our overtime show that follows this show on YouTube. 
So all you need to do is click on that and you'll be transported over there where you can join in, call us, or just listen to more of us. 
Yeah, spread the word and absolutely stay tuned for more updates and information in the weeks and months ahead. 
Yes, Alex. 
I wanted to ask, did the CFP for Hope come out yet, the call for participation? 
Yes. 
In fact, we talked about that last week. 
You were there. 
This is the problem. 
We can't communicate. 
Yes. 
The call for participation has been out for about a week now. 
I'll tell you why. 
Because I was looking for it in my inbox to forward it to somebody who wanted to participate, and I couldn't. 
Well, okay, that's a good point. 
We sent out an announcement saying that the CFP was out. 
We didn't send the CFP to people. 
Maybe we should do that. 
Maybe that's a better idea. 
That was my question. 
Yeah. 
Did the official CFP come out? 
Well, it came out. 
It came out, but it came out on the Hope.net website. 
So what you're saying is that it's better if we take the CFP, make copies of it, and send it to thousands of people instead. 
Yeah. 
Okay. 
All right. 
I wouldn't say hard copies, but, yeah, email is fine. 
Well, yeah, we'll fire up the digital Xerox machine and take care of that. 
All right. 
Very good. 
I look forward to it. 
No, that's a very good suggestion. 
And these are the things we're bad at, Alex. 
You know we are not good at marketing ourselves. 
We are terrible at that. 
You know? 
And I'm not really, you know, that upset that we're terrible at that, but it does hurt us because so many people come to me and say, when's Hope? 
And, you know, Hope was last week, they don't know about it, or they think it's in odd years when it's in even years and things like that. 
So for now, Hope.net is where you get all the information, 2700.com. 
You'll also get information there, and we will be updating people quite a bit in the weeks ahead. 
Hey, some news. 
By the way, we have a special guest coming on in just a couple of minutes, so it's going to be pretty awesome and interesting. 
We have, Kyle, is everything okay? 
You're looking at computers and checking things. 
Everything is great. 
You have a crisis look on your face. 
It's okay? 
How would anyone know that? 
I don't know, but I know there was something going on with connections, and it's all sorted, though, right? 
I don't have to panic about this. 
It's smooth sailing. 
This is radio, E. 
I know that. 
In fact, there's a big sign that says, don't panic. 
It's only radio. 
When we get online, that's when we panic. 
All right. 
So, you know, you remember the trial, the DECSS trial back in the year 2000 that I got hauled into court for? 
That was a lot of fun. 
We've been looking to do something like that again. 
The closest thing so far, though, is that my judge, Judge Lewis Kaplan, has been in the news lately, so he's getting to have all kinds of fun in the courtroom still. 
Today, he threatened to throw Donald Trump out of the court. 
My judge, my judge did this. 
I like to think that I was a good influence. 
You know, I like to think that there was something about the way I conducted myself that gave this guy the courage to stand up to one of the biggest bullies that we've ever known. 
Now, he said, and there's news accounts of this everywhere. 
Lewis Kaplan is the judge. 
He said, Mr. 
Trump has a right to be present here. 
That right can be forfeited, and it can be forfeited if he is disruptive, which is what has been reported to me, and if he disregards court orders. 
So during this particular trial, you know, I'm not even sure which one this is. 
There are so many of them, but I think it's the sexual harassment and abuse trial, one of those. 
There's several of those, too. 
I don't know. 
Yes. 
You need a chart to keep track of all this. 
But basically, after an initial warning, Trump could still be heard making remarks to his lawyers, including, it's a witch hunt, and it really is a con job. 
This is while his victim is testifying that basically accusing him of sexual abuse. 
He's already been found liable for this. 
The judge, Judge Kaplan, then said, Mr. 
Trump, I hope I don't have to consider excluding you from the trial. 
I understand you're probably eager for me to do that. 
And Trump said, I would love it. 
He shot back. 
I would love it. 
And Judge Kaplan said, I know you would like it. 
You just can't control yourself in this circumstance, apparently. 
And apparently, that's where it stopped. 
You know, he didn't throw him out, but he got right up to the edge of the cliff. 
Just didn't do that final push. 
And I'm hoping, I'm hoping, Judge Kaplan, look, I know we've had our disagreements in the past, all right? 
You basically ruled against me. 
I was upset at the time, but I've gotten over it. 
It's been 25 years, 24 years. 
But now, I'm hoping that you can find it within yourself to kick that guy out of your courtroom tomorrow, if he's there, or whenever he misbehaves next. 
Go ahead, Alex. 
Well, I will tell you this, E, and if I recall from the DCSS trial, because I was there for quite a bit of it, and it was, in fact, it was before I was a lawyer. 
It was a couple of years before I became a lawyer, but it was one of the things that was actually quite inspiring to me, and one of the things that I think was really like an exhortation for me to become a lawyer. 
So it was part of my – those were some of my very formative years. 
But I remember you playing some silly games with Judge Kaplan yourself, as a matter of fact, when he had ruled that an injunction was to be put in place. 
If I recall correctly, you were enjoined from posting a link on the 2600 webpage that would link to the source code for DCSS. 
And for listeners that don't recall from 24 years ago, DCSS stands for D, Content Scrambling System. 
The Content Scrambling System was the encryption system that was used on DVDs, which were essentially a monument to stupidity. 
And it was a teenager, I believe, from Norway who came up with this code from DCSS. 
Yes. 
So Judge Kaplan said, if I recall correctly, and I might be recalling incorrectly or slightly incorrectly, that you weren't allowed to post a link on 2600.com. 
It wasn't just a link. 
It was many links. 
It was links to where DCSS was hosted all over the world. 
And, yes, we had sort of a directory there. 
Right. 
That's right. 
Yeah. 
So you weren't allowed to do that. 
So he enjoined you from posting this so people couldn't access the source code. 
So what you did was you just removed the hiker license. 
Excuse me. 
If I may, I complied. 
I complied. 
That's the first thing you need to say, Alex. 
I complied with the judges or Judge Kaplan's orders. 
Unlike Trump, I complied. 
All right. 
Yeah. 
As minimally as you possibly could. 
I mean, that was definitely coming close to the line there. 
I got to say. 
What did I do? 
I mean, I didn't have links up. 
I was told not to have links on the website. 
So everybody could see the link, see what the link was, control C and then control V it into their browser bar and then access the same materials. 
Alex, I can't control what people do on their computers. 
All right. 
Now, the judge told me not to put links up. 
All right. 
And I took the links down. 
Then we put up a list of website addresses. 
And nobody told me to take that down. 
Yeah. 
I mean, this was a lot of fun. 
It was so much fun. 
Being sued, you know, it's you got to try it. 
You got to try it a few times. 
It's it's something else. 
And that was the year we were getting sued by everybody. 
You know, all the the motion picture companies, the NFL, for some reason, got involved. 
And then Ford decided to sue us on top of everything else. 
So it's just it was crazy. 
We won that one, though. 
We won that one. 
But again, Judge Kaplan. 
Good to hear he's he's still he's still practice. 
I can't believe he was he was old back then in 2000. 
Yet he's still on the bench. 
And I mean, this would all do respect. 
He's he he seems to be as as capable as ever. 
And hopefully this time he'll get it right. 
I think so. 
Look, I think he's a great judge. 
He's tough. 
He's no nonsense. 
And also he's he's kind of fun to be in front of as a lawyer. 
And also with respect to the DMCA, that's still very, very much in the news and and in the courts. 
And in fact, I'm involved in a DMCA case right now that involves Altice and Sony and BMG. 
And, yeah, it's just, you know, nonstop fun. 
Twenty four years later, here we are still litigating in federal court over the DMCA. 
OK, that is something that is incredible. 
Well, any any other news from the world of technology? 
Anything interesting happening? 
Changes, developments? 
Things falling apart now? 
Just a lot of blank stares. 
You know, there was a go ahead, Rob. 
Sorry, there was a fun story about OpenAI kind of quietly deleting some wording in its terms of use. 
The wording that it that it deleted referred to referred to referred to a ban on activity that has a high risk of physical harm, including specifically weapons development and military and warfare. 
That language is no longer in their TOS. 
And people have noticed that and wondered just what military applications are in the works for things like OpenAI. 
I heard that story. 
And that was pretty, pretty disturbing that suddenly that was just left out. 
I just keep thinking of how bad OpenAI, ChatGPT, things like that are at like stating simple facts, giving good advice. 
And now they're going to be instructed to, I don't know, bomb certain people and not bomb others. 
Well, you know, I got to say, we should be worried about artificial intelligence and these quote unquote advances. 
It just it just seems like every time they try to do something, whether it be robotic checkouts at supermarkets or, you know, Tesla's driving around in subzero temperatures, something really bad happens and it doesn't work out. 
And they have to go back to the old way of doing things because they just didn't think it through. 
Yeah, I'm not saying there isn't a danger here. 
There is. 
But we're going to have a lot of fun with the mistakes that they make. 
Now, this in this particular case, artificial intelligence being involved in military, that that could be a really bad mistake. 
So we have to be vigilant. 
We have to keep keep our eyes open on that one. 
Yeah, Alex, go ahead. 
Another thing I think is worth mentioning is the because there's irony, I think, abounds in this particular story was the story about the Twitter account or X account, whatever the hell you want to call it, of the SEC being compromised last week. 
And then used to announce the approval of a Bitcoin ETF or exchange traded fund, which is would be essentially wait for you to invest in cryptocurrencies with actually having to buy investing in a fund and not investing directly in the currency itself, like through Bymance or some other exchange or something like that. 
So it was particularly funny because the SEC account was actually compromised. 
It was an unauthorized post that came from the SEC announcing the approval of the of an ETF. 
Yet at the same time, you know, this is the SEC that has taken such a very active role in policing companies is cybersecurity disclosures. 
And in fact, this is the SEC that has recently sued SolarWinds, the company that was breached by the Russians, was I guess it was about two years ago. 
Their software Orion, which is used to manage massive amounts of IT system, was compromised and used as the basis of a supply chain attack that affected thousands of companies worldwide. 
And the SEC recently brought suit against them and their CISO for misrepresentations about cybersecurity. 
And there they are a couple of weeks later, getting compromised on Twitter, making false announcements to the world that are actually market moving. 
And I think this is, you know, such a great example of why. 
And I know I keep banging on about this both here on the radio and within the magazine. 
But why social media is just an inappropriate forum for official governmental announcements? 
We shouldn't be looking to X or Twitter for official SEC. 
Alex, I have to step in, please. 
Don't say X. 
Don't say X. 
Yeah, I know. 
Use the right name. 
Yeah, Twitter. 
It's Twitter. 
It's Twitter. 
It's Twitter. 
It is still Twitter. 
Well, it's not still Twitter, but that's what we're going to call it until it's dying day. 
Sure. 
Yeah. 
Well, why Twitter or Facebook or any of these are just so inappropriate for official communications. 
When you cannot guarantee the security of your accounts, and especially when many of these accounts are managed through third-party service providers who have some kind of API access or persistent session access to these accounts, there are so many different ways that they can be compromised. 
And I just think this shows they are inherently untrustworthy. 
Okay. 
Well, let's leave that there because I want to bring in our special guest, who is Micah Lee. 
He is Director of Information Security over at The Intercept, a security engineer, open-source software developer who writes about technical topics and leaked data sets and the far right. 
He is a frequent Hope contributor as well, and he has just put out a book, which is going to be fascinating to many of our listeners, I believe, called Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations. 
Micah, welcome to the show. 
Hello. 
I'm excited to be here. 
Well, I want to read a little bit from the intro here before we dive in. 
Unlike any other point in history, hackers, whistleblowers, and archivists now routinely make off with terabytes of data from governments, corporations, and extremist groups. 
These data sets often contain gold mines of revelations in the public interest and, in many cases, are freely available for anyone to download. 
Yet, these digital tomes can prove extremely difficult to analyze or interpret, and few people today have the skills to do so. 
Now, this book, entitled Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations, just came out on NoStarch. 
It's available throughout wherever you get books. 
And Micah says he wrote it for journalists, researchers, hacktivists, and anyone else who wants to learn the technologies and coding skills required to investigate these troves of hacked or leaked data. 
So this is not only a book. 
This is an incredible tool, from what I'm hearing. 
First of all, Micah, congratulations on getting this done. 
Thank you. 
Yeah, it's my first time writing a book. 
It turns out it's a lot of work. 
Now, can you give us a specific or even a theoretical example of leaked data being made available to people who don't have the necessary skills to process it? 
What kind of vital details might they miss? 
I'll use a big example that I use throughout the book, which is the Blue Leaks data set, which was basically, it was dumped on the Internet in 2020 in the middle of the Black Lives Matter uprising. 
Anonymous took credit for hacking hundreds of different police websites. 
Most of them were fusion centers. 
And they all basically had the same kind of shoddy web application, and they were all hosted in the same place and stuff. 
So they hacked them all, and it was 270 gigabytes of data. 
And, yeah, this data basically includes a whole lot of stuff, but a lot of it that I was interested in was a lot of, like, police misconduct around spying on the Black Lives Matter activists. 
And also around, like, fusion centers and how they work and how they, you know, sometimes even spread disinformation to local cops and things like that. 
Wow, yes. 
Now, we heard about Blue Leaks, and that's prominently featured in your book. 
And most of Blue Leaks, your claim, has not even been reported on yet. 
There's all this 270 gigs of data, and it hasn't even been processed. 
Yeah. 
Yeah, so when that was happening, I spent a whole lot of time looking in one little corner of Blue Leaks, the NICRIC folder, which is the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, which is my local fusion center. 
So I spent a lot of time looking at that. 
A few people in, like, Austin, Texas looked at the Austin Fusion Center. 
A few people in Maine looked at the fusion center. 
But there's just so much more than that. 
It's all across the United States. 
And for the most part, most of it hasn't even been reported on, which is interesting. 
And actually, like, I noticed that in the last few weeks, there's actually been a few new stories coming out of Blue Leaks, even though this is from 2020, including, like, The Guardian in December posted a story that was, like, U.S. 
police agencies took intelligence directly from IDF Leaks Files show. 
And it was, yeah, so I guess training materials about Muslim extremists were taken from, you know, IDF and pro-azil groups. 
And so that's, so yeah, there's still stuff in there. 
And I'm hoping that more people will look into their local police. 
Now, you, if I'm not mistaken, got your start working with this kind of thing with the Snowden Archive. 
Is that correct? 
Yes, it is. 
The Snowden Archive was the first data set that I started working with and also kind of how I accidentally fell into journalism. 
Like, while Snowden was leaking documents, I actually was working at EFF. 
I was a staff technologist. 
And I got an anonymous email from just, you know, someone I had no idea who it was. 
And it was encrypted to my PGP key. 
And it was like, like, hey, can you please help me teach some journalists how to use encryption? 
And I was like, okay. 
And so I ended up teaching some journalists how to use encryption. 
And it turned out that I was talking to Edward Snowden. 
And I ended up kind of doing a lot of the, like, communication and security work for the Snowden League. 
And so after The Intercept was founded, like, Laura Poitras was, like, contacting me and being like, would you like to come work with us and do, you know, this security for journalists? 
Full time. 
And then I started, you know, after I started working at The Intercept, I also kind of did a bunch of journalism myself. 
I didn't really, I was never trained in it. 
I didn't really expect it to happen. 
But, but it's very interesting. 
And I like it. 
So you weren't a journalism major or anything like that? 
No, no, no. 
I was actually a college dropout. 
Okay. 
Good for you, then. 
Thank you. 
I mean, it probably inspires a lot of listeners that, yes, you can, you can become a renowned journalist. 
And investigator just by having, having the passion to, to follow this. 
But let me just ask you, since working on the Snowden Archive, how would you say your skills have improved in being able to process that kind of material? 
So, like, starting working on the Snowden Archive, I was really into hacking. 
I was really into, like, going to Hope and going to DEF CON and things like that. 
And I worked as a web developer. 
I did a lot of, like, PHP, MySQL stuff. 
And I was really interested in this stuff. 
But I had never actually, I didn't really have a background in, like, data science. 
I never actually, like, worked with big sets of data. 
And so, I sort of kind of taught myself a lot with the Snowden Archive, which is, which is a very difficult way to teach yourself. 
Because, you know, you have to do it on air-gapped computers. 
And you have all sorts of restrictions and all sorts of stuff. 
It was an intense time. 
But since then, I've spent, like, the last 10 years doing this. 
And there's just so many data sets that keep coming out that are, like, you know, in lots of different formats. 
Sometimes you have big jumps of emails. 
Sometimes you have, like, a SQL database. 
Sometimes you have, I don't know, like, a scrape of thousands or millions of JSON files or whatever. 
Or collections of Office documents. 
And so, basically, like, I've learned how to look through all of these. 
And, you know, in this book, I'm trying to go through all these different types of data sets and show you how to deal with them. 
Alex, I believe you had a question. 
Yeah. 
Mike, I just want to say, I think it's fantastic that you're self-taught in so many respects. 
And I want to go back to one of the things that you mentioned, which was that Snowden had contacted you asking if you could teach others to use PGP and encryption, which I think is hilarious. 
I mean, knowing what we know now, I think people forget that Glenn Greenwald had no idea how to use encryption back then. 
And then I think it was very ironic that he became such a pro-privacy advocate and was so internationally known for being pro-privacy. 
But at the time, Snowden actually had to pass him over. 
And it seems like go to you so he could – and you and Laura, presumably, could go and help him understand how to use encryption. 
I think that's really funny. 
That's exactly what happened. 
And I spent, like, a few weeks trying to – I mean, Glenn was living in Brazil, and I was living in Berkeley. 
So just, like, trying to, as much as I could, you know, over not-encrypted channels because he wasn't really using encryption yet, teach him how to use encryption and teach him how to use PGP. 
It was very – it was difficult. 
But PGP is, like, notoriously, like, pulling teeth. 
It's a very hard technology to use. 
And ultimately, we ended up actually getting Pidgin and OTR encryption working, like, with OverJabber. 
And that turned out to be much simpler. 
But, like, I don't know. 
Today, those problems have been solved. 
It's great. 
You could just use Signal, and you have end-to-end encryption, and it's easy. 
Security is much, much, much better today than it was in 2013. 
And I think a big part of that is thanks to the Snowden link. 
Yeah, no doubt. 
And one of the other things I wanted to ask you about, in terms of working with these data sets, you mentioned the Blue Leaks data set. 
I think, if I recall correctly, that came from distributed denial of secrets, right? 
Is that where that was originally distributed? 
Yeah. 
Yeah, it was. 
The group that claimed responsibility was anonymous, and they leaked it to distributed denial of secrets. 
And so I work closely with The Adolf Secrets. 
And so a big part about this book is that it teaches you how to look through data sets, but it uses the real data sets as examples. 
And so all of the data sets that you download, like, as you're following along, all come from VDOS Secrets, and they're all public and available for everyone to download. 
But, yeah, Blue Leaks is the big one that's from VDOS Secrets. 
That's fantastic to know. 
We've had distributed denial of secrets, DDoS Secrets on here a couple of times over the last few years, and they've always been fantastic. 
They do such great, fearless work. 
One of the issues that came up, and I guess, God, this had to be about a year and a half, two years ago, was that in the immediate wake of the Russian aggression in Ukraine, the Russia v. 
Ukraine war starting, I don't know if you recall, there were these massive data leaks from Russian enterprises, from companies, from government institutions all around the world. 
And DDoS Secrets was putting them out there, but the problem that they had was that there just weren't enough Russian speakers. 
And with all these documents being in a foreign language, all of them being in Cyrillic, it became really difficult to separate the signal from the noise. 
Is this still a big problem, do you think, Micah? 
Yeah, this is definitely still a big problem. 
And I remember that a lot. 
I actually, I wrote all about the, like, dozens and dozens of huge data sets that DDoS Secrets was publishing at the time. 
And I worked on this big international collaboration, like, looking into these data sets. 
I actually talk about it a little bit in the book. 
In fact, actually, one of them is the GTRK, which is a massive, like, state-owned TV station or a company full of TV stations across Russia. 
And in the example of email, of, like, reading email dumps, reading other people's email in my book, there's a, I had searched for the Cyrillic transliteration of Tucker Carlson. 
And I showed, like, a screenshot of, like, a Tucker Carlson segment that's being played on Russian TV, where he's, I forget exactly, but basically saying Hunter Biden, Ukraine conspiracies. 
But, yeah, like, that's definitely still a problem, especially with the Russian stuff, because there's, like, a lot of, you know, Russian-speaking journalists who are in Russia, but it's really not safe for them to be looking through this data. 
And there's, like, a handful of, you know, Russian journalists that are kind of in exile working on it. 
And there's a few really good newsrooms that are doing a lot of critical reporting on Putin and on Russia. 
But, you know, like, the scale of the data is intense. 
But also, this isn't just a problem with the, you know, massive amounts of Russian data sets. 
It's kind of a problem with all the data sets, because basically, like, every single day, pretty much, there's new big data sets that, you know, probably a lot of them have really interesting, newsworthy stuff that the public should know about. 
And there's so few people that really know how to even download them, much less, once you get them, how to actually, like, dig into them and figure out what all the revelations are. 
And so I feel like I'm kind of drowning in data sets, and there's just, I have to skip most of them when I hear about a data set. 
Like, you know, a tiny percentage of them I, like, go and grab and look at, because I'm normally busy working on other projects and stuff. 
So what I'm hoping to do is make a lot more people that have these skills and that can start doing this work. 
You're building an army, it sounds like. 
Exactly. 
Wow, that's awesome. 
Go ahead, Alex. 
And, Mike, what about, speaking of just, you know, the volume of data sets, right? 
I mean, the volume and velocity of data that's being leaked or exfiltrated in some way is so extraordinary lately. 
And I think a lot of that is born out of things like supply chain attacks. 
Have you looked at any of the data or played around with any of the data from the recent breach of the MoveIt file transfer system? 
I don't know if you recall or if our listeners recall, but the MoveIt file transfer system was hacked ostensibly by a Russian group by the name of CLOP, which translates roughly to bedbugs in Russian. 
And MoveIt is essentially like an FTP program or file transfer protocol program. 
And a lot of companies just left data in this FTP system, which had this universal vulnerability that was automated, that was the exploitation of which was automated by CLOP. 
And they were able to steal massive amounts of data from hundreds of companies. 
And then, Mike, as you probably saw, they posted a lot of this data out on the dark web if companies did not pay them an extortion to take it down. 
So there's massive amounts of data from CLOP that's out there right now that relates to a huge chunk of the Fortune 1000 in the U.S. 
and around the world. 
Have you played around with any of that yet? 
So I followed this whole huge breach somewhat, but I haven't actually looked at any of the data from it. 
And that's, like, an example. 
Like, I'm sure that it's full of stuff, especially, like, for massive, you know, international conglomerates and big companies. 
I'm sure that there's a lot of really interesting stuff in there. 
But, no, I haven't looked at any of those specific ones. 
Like, basically, what I kind of tend to focus on is I follow DDoS secrets really closely, like, what they kind of curate, which is, you know, they put out so many data sets so frequently. 
But it's still just, like, a tiny slice of what's out there. 
So I follow what they curate. 
And then also if people, like, reach out to me directly to, you know, tell me about something or to just privately send me data or something like that. 
But, yeah, so I had heard about that. 
I followed it in the news. 
But I didn't actually download any of that data. 
Yeah. 
I'll tell you, and speaking of downloading, it's actually kind of funny what happened with it, too, is because they had all the data available on the dark web. 
This is CLOP. 
So everything was through a .onion site. 
And some of these data sets would be, like, 300 gigabytes, huge amount of data. 
It's not going to work over a tour. 
I mean, it's going to work. 
It's just going to take you weeks. 
Well, exactly, and companies themselves whose data were released, I've represented a number of them, and it became impossible to get the data and then to validate that it was, in fact, their data or even try to figure out what the hell was in it until CLOP got wise to the fact that their download system was horribly broken, and they created torrents for these companies' data. 
So that was how they solved it. 
All right. 
Go ahead, Kyle. 
You have a question? 
Yeah. 
Hi, Micah. 
I was wondering, were there any – this has a lot of different software tools and things that I had never heard of, and so I really encourage a lot of people that are interested in the steps involved in doing this kind of investigative work. 
But my question was, are there any tools that you, like, wish you had or are there things that you don't have or that haven't been created yet and shared that would be useful in this that you haven't yet stumbled upon good solutions for? 
I mean, I'm sure there's a lot. 
There's, like, what I often end up doing and what, like, a big part of the book actually is devoted to is writing custom stuff. 
So if you have a specific data set that doesn't really fit the existing tools, that's why a big chunk of the book is to teach you Python programming so that you can just start writing your own, like, very simple scripts but that are able to just, like, go through stuff. 
And I feel like there could be tools that could improve a lot of that work and make it easier for people to do without having to do any programming. 
But also, you know, for everyone who's intimidated by programming, it's, like – there is definitely programming in the book, but it, like, holds your hand for the entire thing. 
It doesn't expect any prior experience. 
So if you're interested in this but you are, you know, not sure about the programming stuff, you could totally do it, and you could totally follow along, and it, like, teaches you the – not just, like, how it works, but the whole process. 
It's, like, okay, try running your code now. 
You see this output. 
Now try and add this thing and run it again. 
And another thing about that is that if you use – I mean, you were talking about, like, ChatGPT earlier, you know, ChatGPT for evil, but ChatGPT can actually be very useful for helping you write code. 
And so I think that if you pair this with ChatGPT, where you don't actually share any data with ChatGPT or OpenAI, you just say, I'm writing a program. 
I want to look through all the rows in a spreadsheet and do this. 
And it can give you a little bit of example code that then you could edit. 
And I think that that could actually save a lot of time. 
And actually, speaking of – you were asking about tools that will be great to exist that don't really exist. 
I think that there are potentially some AI things that could be helpful, but for most of this stuff, I really don't want to trust third parties with the data. 
So I don't want to, like, give a copy of my whole data sets to OpenAI or to Microsoft or to Google or whatever. 
I think that there's a lot of open-source machine learning and AI things that could happen locally on your computer. 
And so the more of that, if there's tools where it's, like, you know, to translation tools and transcription tools to convert, like, audio into text and, you know, summarization and all sorts of stuff where you can just do this all, like, on your own computer or even on an AirGraph computer. 
You don't need the Internet. 
You don't need to share the data. 
That type of stuff will be really helpful, especially if it's easy to use. 
You're listening to Off the Hook on WBAI. 
We're talking with Micah Lee, author of the just-released book, Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations, available at NoStarchPress and all kinds of other places where you get books. 
Gila, you had a question. 
I did. 
Well, Micah, it's not even necessarily a question, but I really wanted to thank you. 
As a person who is fascinated by data, but definitely intimidated by programming, I was sitting there reading the introduction. 
I had the biggest smile on my face. 
I'm really excited to read this book. 
I had a twitch. 
I was reading the intro on my phone, and I'm sorry I didn't have a computer next to me because I wanted to start using the stuff you're talking about in the book. 
This is really exciting stuff to be talking about, and the way that you have kind of removed some of the barriers to entry. 
I'm really, really excited to sit down and do this, not least because of the real-world examples you're using. 
These data sets that we've been talking about here on this particular program over the course of the last couple of years are the real-world examples that are being used in the book. 
This is, you know, I'm a programming neophyte, I will admit it, but I don't feel like this is something that is impossible or intimidating. 
So thank you so much for opening this all up to someone like me. 
I'm really excited to dive in more, Micah, and thank you. 
Yeah, absolutely. 
I'm really happy to hear that. 
One of the chapters that I had a lot of fun writing that is a data set that I believe you've probably talked about in this show is the Parler data set, which included a lot of videos from January 6th. 
But basically, this one, so on January 6th, 2021, when Trump supporters were trying to, you know, subvert democracy and everything, they, you know, stormed the Capitol building, and they all had their phones, and they all took videos of themselves doing it, and they posted those videos to this right-wing social network called Parler. 
And a lot of those videos had metadata with their GPS coordinates in it. 
So there was, like, a whole lot of stuff. 
After January 6th, the AWS, which is the Parler's hosting provider, announced that it was going to de-platform them and kick them off the service because they wouldn't moderate content that incited violence. 
And then also Google and Apple did the same for the Parler app. 
And an activist was, like, oh, these videos probably contain a lot of important evidence about the January 6th insurrection. 
And she basically, like, wrote a script to go through and download over a million videos, which was something like 54 carabytes of data from Parler over, like, the two-day period before they got taken offline. 
And so one of the data sets is the metadata from over a million videos from Parler. 
And so you end up, like, it walks you through writing the code to, like, the very, very simple code. 
These are, like, you know, 20-line Python scripts to do stuff like loop through each of the million files and figure out which of these videos were filmed in Washington, D.C. 
on January 6th. 
And then, like, how to actually, like, plot them on Google Earth so you can go around and be like, oh, here's what happened outside of the Capitol. 
Here's inside the Capitol. 
Let's watch this video. 
So, yeah, you can totally go ahead and do that using the book by following one of the chapters. 
And I'm really excited that you are so into the book. 
You know, it's amazing. 
You give readers the opportunity to actually download genuine leaked data sets and show them how to extract information from them. 
You give them the opportunity to work with the Oath Keepers data set, which sounds really scary, but it's also super intriguing. 
And I can see this being a really popular project among the readers. 
Is there enough to go around? 
I mean, yeah, so I use a bunch of specific data sets that I had, like, you know, like, looked at and worked with in my own journalism over the last few years as examples for this. 
And, you know, like, when you read the book and follow along, you'll be using these same data sets. 
But the real purpose was just, like, at teaching tools. 
The idea is that you should be able to take any data set that you end up getting your hands on. 
Like, you go to DDoS Secrets and see what has been, you know, released through them recently. 
And then you can go ahead and just download that one that you're interested in and then just use the skills to look through that. 
So, yeah, there's definitely enough data sets to go around. 
There's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of terabytes of data that are just, you know, out there with a lot of really interesting stuff in them. 
We've had the folks from Distributed Denial Service on many times, or secrets, rather, on many times, or a few times, anyway. 
Would you consider them a model in how to process and share leaked data sets? 
Yeah, I mean, I really like how they work. 
And I actually think that it would be great if it wasn't just them, if there was, like, more organizations that did similar things. 
And it wasn't, like, just this one group is all we have. 
Because things have been kind of, like, tenuous in terms – it's, like, a tiny, scrappy collective that, you know, have very few – they have, like, two paid staff, and they live on a stipend. 
And, I don't know, I'm always nervous about the future of it. 
And I think that, yeah, go ahead and donate to ZDOT Secrets if you can. 
But it would be great if more organizations started doing this type of work. 
But, you know, obviously, there's a lot of risks. 
People tend to really not like it when you publish their leaked data. 
But I really like that they make a lot of data sets public. 
But then they also make a lot of data sets what they call limited distribution, which means instead of making them just available for anyone to go online and download, they give them to journalists and to researchers that request access. 
And so this is a way that they can protect a lot of privacy. 
Because one of the things about data sets is oftentimes you end up with, like, huge databases of people's phone numbers and email addresses and other private information. 
And maybe there's some really interesting stuff in there, but also there's a lot of private data in there. 
And so what they're able to do is – like, actually, a good example is the Oath Keepers. 
The Oath Keepers data set, there was actually two parts of it. 
There's a public part that anyone can download, and that's just a dump of all of their email from the Oath Keepers email server, from Oath Keepers.org email addresses. 
And then the private part is, like, membership lists and donation lists and things like that. 
And so what ended up happening is, like, a lot of newsrooms requested access to the private parts and then spent a lot of time doing, like, real investigative journalism, tracking down all these people who, you know, had at one point, you know, maybe been an Oath Keepers member or a donor or signed a petition for them or something like that and figuring out how many of these are, you know, currently active law enforcement, how many of them are politicians in elected office right now and things like that. 
But, you know, just because your name is on one of these lists doesn't necessarily mean that it should be public for the whole world, especially if somebody else – you know, like, you never know. 
You have to do real work to verify data. 
And so I think the whole limited distribution model does a whole lot to solve that. 
Interesting. 
Yeah. 
But, you know, DDoS Secrets is also targeted just for doing this. 
You can't even link to them on Twitter. 
That's been the case since before Elon Musk. 
So they've really had to deal with some degree of hardship. 
And I'm sure, as you say, there are people who aren't that thrilled that their data is out there. 
But, you know, related to that, how is it so much of this information is getting leaked? 
What are these people doing wrong? 
It seems almost everybody is having their data sets leaked at one point or another. 
I mean, I think the crux of the matter is that computer security is hard. 
It's really hard. 
It's like it's really hard to be a defender. 
It's much easier in some ways to be an attacker, especially if you, you know, don't really care about leaving tracks. 
And so I think that's the big crux of it is, yeah, like data breaches happen constantly because computer security is really, really hard to get done. 
But also there's a lot of a lot of the data sets are not necessarily even like a data breach. 
It's much exactly like the parlor one I was talking about. 
This was actually just public data on the Internet that was scraped. 
It's like somebody decided to sit down and write some code to download a million videos and extract the metadata from them. 
And anyone could have done this because they were just on the Internet. 
And it turned out that like a lot of those videos were used in Trump's second impeachment inquiry. 
And so that's that's one way. 
There's also like some other ways that aren't aren't, you know, hacking is sometimes groups have open S3 buckets or open like Google Drive folders or whatever, where they just have the permissions that wrong to just like allow anyone with the link. 
And this actually happened. 
What was the what was the name of the group? 
It was this it's this anti-trans group, the American College of Pediatricians. 
This is one of the data sets that's on D.C. 
They're like the Southern Property Law Center called them an anti-trans hate group. 
And they like did legal briefings to help overturn Roe v. 
Wade. 
They had a open Google Drive folder with 20 gigabytes of like internal documents. 
Oh, and somebody found the link, downloaded the 20 gigabytes. 
And now that's the data set. 
And that's not exactly a hack. 
I mean, sort of. 
It was just like a mistake that someone made. 
Someone just like wanted to share it with, you know, someone and didn't feel like, you know, sharing it directly with their Google account and just made it public and sent them the link and thought that would be good. 
But now the data is out there. 
And I feel like that's actually a lot of a lot of the case how these data sets get out there, too. 
We only have a couple of minutes left, but I'd like to give you a chance to talk about your work investigating America's frontline doctors, what you're able to uncover about them using a collection of hacked files. 
Yeah. 
So this is one of the case studies of the book. 
So basically, in the middle of the pandemic or early in the pandemic, in like 2021, a hacker messaged me anonymously on Signal and said that they had hacked the horse-paced peddlers and that they were hilariously easy to hack. 
And basically, it was this group called America's Frontline Doctors. 
And really, it was these telehealth companies that they were working with. 
This is an anti-vaccine group that was founded by Simone Gold, who is, like, a very prominent, like, kind of anti-science doctor. 
She was also a January 6th insurrectionist. 
She served a few months in prison for that. 
But basically, what they were doing was teaching everyone that, you know, wearing masks is bad, vaccines are bad. 
The only way to protect yourself from COVID is hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. 
And then they were selling it to people. 
And so they had this whole network of, like, things where basically, if you believe this propaganda, you can go and pay $90 for a telehealth consultation. 
And then you get on the phone and you talk to somebody. 
And then they write you a prescription for ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine. 
And I found that basically, like, over 72,000 people were tricked into paying at least $15 million. 
But probably it was actually a lot more for fake health care during the pandemic. 
And, yeah, there's a whole case study on how all this worked. 
In this case, it was this isn't a public data set. 
This is a private data set that a hacker just sent me privately. 
And so it's not public data. 
And, in fact, it really shouldn't be public data because it's, you know, patient records. 
And it was actually, like, 250,000 patient records. 
And only 72,000 of them had ended up paying. 
But, yeah, people's private health information and that shouldn't be public. 
But I basically ended up finding, uncovering this huge scam that ended up, you know, triggering a congressional investigation into them. 
Amazing. 
Well, Micah, this has been so fascinating. 
And, again, congratulations on the book. 
It's called Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations, available through NoStarch Press and wherever you get books. 
Anything that you want to tell our listeners? 
Any links or contact info or anything like that? 
Yes. 
Go to hacksandleaks.com. 
That's the book's website. 
And, you know, so this is a book that's for sale. 
But one of the things that I really wanted to do is make sure that this information is available to everybody, even if they can't afford it. 
And so I've released the entire book under a Creative Commons license. 
And so the whole book is actually available to start reading now on the website, hacksandleaks.com, if you want. 
And if you like it and if you can afford it, then you can totally buy a copy, too. 
And it's probably, at least for me personally, way nicer to read a physical book that has all this information than just in a web browser. 
But, yeah, so please go and check it out. 
And I have some contact information on that website. 
And if you like it, let me know. 
All right, Michael Lee, thank you so much for joining us tonight. 
You're welcome to stay on for overtime. 
Listeners, you can write to us, OTH at 2600.com. 
Please support WBAI. 
Give to WBAI.org. 
We will see you again on WBAI next week at 7 p.m. 
And again on overtime, starting in about eight minutes on YouTube. 
Good night. 
  and welcome to everybody over on youtube this is overtime an extension of off the hook and uh let's make sure everybody made it into youtube land kyle you here i am okay not a surprise you're in the same room um rob gila you make it okay we did yes did indeed and yes and alex alex had to uh step off mike for uh for a brief moment he'll be back in a couple of minutes he said um and we are in fact on youtube we are and we're sounding good i think it's always good to verify that and uh michael lee have you joined us i have i'm still here great um okay well uh since mike is on the phone we we're not gonna be able to take phone calls but we are right kyle there's only one phone yeah that's correct so but uh we have a chat for people who are listening on on the youtube stream so ask your questions there gila will read them and uh we can proceed in that way um but mike again um fascinating book um i just feel so inspired that there's finally a way you know to get out there and process this information i was feeling the same frustration uh just with so much of a of a glut of data being being thrown at us and so much being being lost in the noise yeah um i hope it works i i don't know how many people have uh have actually read the book yet but like i'm really hoping that uh a lot of people get really inspired by this and start digging through all of this data how long have you been um uh been putting this together uh it took me about two years i basically started um uh i started actually the america's frontline doctors stuff like right around then i was basically like i i thought that it was a really really like interesting um set of work that i did for for that journalism and i was like i really wanted to tell people about it and get more people learn how to do it and that was one of the big things that inspired it and i have been kind of thinking about it for a few years before that even um uh but yeah i've been working on it basically for about two years and it was just published uh earlier this month wow well um i i are you at all concerned though about um uh quote-unquote the wrong people um picking up these skills is there any potential danger involved in in becoming good at this um i mean yes i think that there is some danger involved in being good at this but i also think that the wrong people already like in a lot of cases already have these skills like i think that uh uh you know like a lot of uh police or you know uh intelligence people or like you know people who work for oppressive regimes and stuff they're the people who already have these skills really to like dig through data sets and find stuff and i think that um the people who don't have these skills are uh everyone else um yeah so so i'm i'm not i i don't know i i'm i'm a really big proponent of more people learning more skills and information being free and so um uh i think and then also like you know maybe some more like kind of fascist people might get these skills by reading this book but they just don't really have you know the truth on their side they have a lot of disinformation on their side and these skills aren't really helpful with this information so interesting yeah i guess i guess that that would be true have you ever come across um um a leaked data set of a of a group that you might feel some sympathy for like uh you know puppies for orphans or something like that would that would that make a difference in how the information got processed um yeah i mean i always make decisions about like you know like like i i definitely prefer when i'm picking any sort of journalism to work on to uh uh kind of pick things that i i don't like and want to change you know like i really try to have impact and so if there's a data leak for you know uh uh puppies um like unless it was unless you know i had some sort of reason to believe that this like puppy charity is actually you know a terrible front for you know arms dealing or something and i could actually like prove that with the data like i would just i would just skip it and move on or maybe you know rudy giuliani got a puppy or something and we should all be concerned yeah that's true that that could that could be some hard-hitting news wow well you know there's so much out there and it's just really um uh incredible that um these tools are are are becoming known to people and i think it's it's all part of uh spreading knowledge and uh educating people now uh kyle brought up uh you know the tools and i see a bunch of them here that um i haven't used danger zone onion share of course the tour browser we're familiar with signal app and and we use secure drop at 2600 but can you tell us something about those those other apps and yeah so actually i in addition to doing journalism i'm a software developer and both danger zone and onion share are both um software that i made uh that i developed um and here actually i can post some links in the chat oh you're in the chat as well that's great yeah um here's onion share so basically uh oh wait i have to wait 24 seconds before making another post uh yes gila gila can explain why that is sorry we um we have slow mode enabled micah sorry about that um actually not sorry it does it is very helpful but um yeah so hang in there actually if you're trying to send links you may not be able to post them i may need to so are you seeing the links that i posted i just posted it says danger zone dot rocks and onion uh negatory uh you said danger zone dot rocks yeah because danger zone rocks uh absolutely that's cool um i didn't know that was a tld dot org um so so basically danger zone is uh was kind of inspired by cubes the cubes operating system is the idea is like when you're working with uh uh you know data assets that include office documents or pdfs things just opening those could hack your computer but a lot of times you really need to open them because that's what the data is and so so like you can't be sure what's safe to open and what's safe not to open or what will hack you if you open it and so danger zone is basically a program that takes office documents like this and converts them into pdfs that you know that you could open that won't hack your computer computer and it works um in a very similar way to how like the cubes um operating system uh trusted pdf feature works where it's basically except except with danger zone it works on any computer it works on windows mac os linux um and it uses docker containers so it's sort of a digital version of like taking a document and then printing it out and then re-scanning it so that if it has any malware if it has anything that tries to phone home all that stuff will be stripped and you just get like the re-scanned version um and then it also does like ocr so uh optical character recognition so that you have a text player still so you can still like copy and paste from the document um but yeah that's basically what danger zone is um and so uh yeah it's useful for working with leaked data sets but it's also just like let's say you get an email with an attachment and you're not quite sure if it's legitimate or if it's phishing and um um it's safer to just run that document that attachment through danger zone before you open it because then uh you won't get hacked so that's what danger zone is um and then onion share is software that i first started developing back in like 2014 and now there's a big team of people that work on it um and it's basically uses uh it's software that uses tor onion services it turns your computer into tor onion service to do a variety of things including like primarily sharing files so if i wanted to securely and anonymously send you a bunch of files i could open onion share drag the files into it click start and then there's just an onion address in in my window and i can copy and paste that to you through like a an encrypted messaging app and then you can load that url in tor browser and what you're actually doing is loading a website posted directly on my computer and then you can download files directly from me and so it's like no third parties involved but i can send you files you don't have to know who i am at all because it's an onion service um and it could also work the other way you could you could turn your computer into like an anonymous dropbox so uh you can make it so your computer has an onion address and then you can share that in your uh you know social media bio or whatever and then anyone on the internet can go and upload files to your computer um which you know is another reason to use danger zone because they can also upload malware to your computer right right wow that's a lot and uh it's it's something that i think we all should be familiar with because um it's it's you know it's dangerous out there and and you have to be careful what you're what you're uploading and downloading and and and all that um do you use uh secure drop at all yeah yeah i i use the gear drop um actually like early on in in secure drop's life i like contributed some code to it also um but i uh so at the intercept um we have a secure drop and uh uh i like manage the secure dot servers and um we have other people that that check it but i occasionally check it myself um uh yeah i'm a i'm a big supporter of secure dot great yeah we use it here at 2600 as well and it's uh yeah yeah well mostly we get we get uh um i don't want to say spam but it's a lot of religion for some reason i'm not sure why that is go ahead gila um we do have a comment from our good pal johnny fusion who probably would call us but can't right now um he says so looking at the book on the website i see he talks about epic and i dug into that leak quite a bit the hardest part was importing the databases as they were so big yeah um so they are they are huge and so part of this so let's see so actually if you go to hacksandleaks.com and click start reading um this is the entire book and so epic is chapter 12 um and so this actually goes over the epic data set so the example well the first half of the chapter is just teaching you how to write how to do sql uh like sql queries but then the second half is the epic data set um it's huge and one of the smaller there's like nine different mysql databases um and the smallest one is like about two gigabytes and the bigger ones are like 15 gigabytes or 20 gigabytes and so they're enormous and take a lot to uh import with this book you just import the smallest one which is still big and it still takes a while um but it does actually like walk you through exactly how to do it and exactly how to even like like if something fails in the middle of the import how to how to you know dump your drop your database and start over um and uh there's some tips on on using cloud servers so this is one of the things when i'm working with data like this um uh that's so big it's really helpful to um uh use a server that's just always on that's not your own like laptop and so you can like ssh into it you can connect to it remotely um you can uh set up on my sql server there and then import it and then and then you know it might take you a few days of your import script run before it's finished but a few days later it'll be finished and that's just like really annoying if it's just on your laptop and you're trying to like suspend it and like use other software and stuff so using a server to do this stuff is really really helpful um and uh yeah definitely it's time consuming to import the data but once you have it imported there's there's a lot of really interesting data um and that chapter also goes into uh uh you know exactly how to get past epics who is privacy which which which i think is probably the most interesting stuff i don't know if are you all familiar with epic like what the company is that was that was the question i was going to ask you mike this is alex i'm i'm back here the um we're talking about epic the domain name registrar is that right yeah epik yes it's it's like a christian nationalist company basically um they they uh are a domain name registrar they also have a few other services like uh they do some web hosting and um they have like a kind of cloud flare competitor type thing um it's run by a guy named rob monster that's right but it's uh you can't make it up yeah but so their domain name um uh stuff so a lot of people move to epic when they get like de-platformed from other places so like um 8chan uh uh uh the the person the mass shooter who went into like i think a grocery store or a walmart in texas and killed like dozens of um latino people um posted his manifesto on 8chan and so then i think 8chan was using go daddy and go daddy kicked them off after that and then they just moved to epic um and uh like gab uh which is like this far-right social network that's also hosted uh uh uh you know like like like like the um tree of life synagogue shooter um that uh a few years ago that killed a bunch of jews who were uh like on shabbat and synagogue um posted to gab like right before uh he went in and did the shooting um and and so gab is using epics so basically like it's a lot of websites like this um and some neo-nazi websites and stuff um uh and so all of these domain names are protected by epics who is privacy service and this is their databases so basically like uh at the point of time when the attack happened which was uh i think like september 2021 maybe um any domain registered at that point or earlier you could actually go through and find the real owners of these domains um so you can like so like like as part of the example uh so 8chan renamed to 8coon i guess to kind of rebrand itself and also like the the people who own it are also probably the people behind um qanon which is a whole other mess but uh as an example i show you how to like run the queries to go and find the like actual ownership information behind the uh uh 8coon website um and also oathkeepers.org uses epic and and i and i figured out like uh the technical contact was like someone else that i cross-referenced in the and the oathkeepers uh email dump and and it's basically like this seems to be their tech support guy who runs some like little company in new jersey so yeah there's there's a lot of stuff like that wow how how do you keep up with it all i mean there's just so much out there you know be good just to just to read a summary of what's been done so far because it really is impressive yeah i mean i don't keep up with all of it i i keep up with my own little like you know what i've i've managed to um to to track and to follow but um but yeah there is so much out there and there's also like you know a lot of good work that i probably am not that aware of and also you know like this this happens all over the world and i only speak english and like a little bit of spanish so so but there's like a huge like you know we were talking on the show like russian language data breaches there's huge um spanish language data breaches like the entire uh mexican military's like exchange server their email server was um hacked and uh leaked and and this was like a huge scandal throughout mexico and also throughout a lot of latin america was like here's all the internal secrets of um uh the mexican military and and and stuff like that like that barely even like touched the united states but that was like like 500 gigabytes of email or something so well you know on that on that topic because that certainly wouldn't sit well with the military people in mexico uh but what have you have you gotten any kind of uh negative uh response from from putting out this book people who don't want to see that out there um i haven't gotten very much negative response yet i have i've definitely well actually that's not true i did notice that like a profile for me appeared on like a like antifa watcher website oh wow uh so i guess that was a negative response but like someone just pointed it out to me like i didn't actually even notice on my own except for someone someone showed me um i'm expecting some of that will happen more because just because there is so much of this book is kind of like about researching the far right so i'm expecting probably there will be some some more stuff like that um but so but but pretty much like it's mostly been positive uh uh reaction but i also think that a lot of people haven't like actually gone through and read the whole book yet and maybe maybe that'll change right um yeah well didn't you get your twitter account suspended but for for being a journalist and reporting on twitter yeah yeah yeah i was one of the uh the journalists that like right after elon musk took over twitter he suspended my twitter account and the actual tweet that i had that i got suspended over was um a tweet about how twitter is now censoring mastodon links i mean at the time i think they stopped doing that um and uh yeah so and i think it also i think it was i was uh had a screenshot of the like ewan jet mastodon account or something but yeah so i got i got kicked off twitter and then uh you know elon musk did this whole like twitter poll and decided to like it was i was like permanently suspended and he decided to like unpermanently suspend me but i was still suspended until i like logged in and deleted the tweet and i basically didn't log in and delete the tweet for like six months or something so i kind of stopped using twitter but then i decided to log in and just delete all of my tweets and now i just don't use twitter i have i have tried to use it a little bit to like tweet about my uh book because i just published a book right but um uh i'm pretty sure i'm like pretty shadow banned like yeah i have like 50 000 followers but like i get like 300 views when i yeah no engagement we we this is the same problem we had with with hope last week uh trying to get people to buy tickets and nobody's responding usually you know we at least get get a lot of trolls you know saying something to us but nobody and and you look at the number of views and it's like a couple of hundred and we have what 50 000 followers and yeah you know we used to get so much and no matter what we said we get a lot of engagement so it's you know and mastodon is great we get um a good response there but it doesn't compare yet to what we had on twitter before elon musk got his hands on yeah i know same i like i use mastodon and blue sky like recently decided to try using the corporate ones like threads um but like it's just not none of it compares to like the old days the pre elon musk days of twitter no it doesn't and i i refuse to call it x i just you know i feel like that would be giving him something yeah i mean he already owns it though like i don't know like like i'm sort of you know on the like maybe just completely just abandon twitter to the trolls like camp and yeah i don't know i don't know it's tough it's tough uh rob do you have something rob i think they're frozen okay hey rob you had your hand up but then you froze so i'm not sure if you were talking i okay are you there i i was i was not but uh hello um yeah i i experienced uh similar symptoms on uh twitter when i did what you did micah and i deleted all my old tweets i just figured you know blow this for a game of soldiers i'm done actually participating in twitter and i just kept it to a few tweets about you know i'm releasing this thing i did this thing and since i did that i also saw um and also you know this may be just a factor of what era twitter is in now and how they're doing things but compared to how much engagement i used to get uh there's almost nothing now and uh it's it's sad it's uh you know the an era has well and truly ended but uh but mastodon's great and in fact you were talking about responses to your book micah and i uh we did notice that on your mastodon you posted one of your first amazon reviews which was uh rather entertaining yes um wait let me let me pull up the toots i still can't get used to that word yeah where is it oh here it is yeah uh great book just leave politics out of it you know when people say that we get that all the time it just basically means that they disagree with us on on some issue and um you know if you're talking about yeah well you know this these people are starving in this particular country don't get political you know it's it's just something they don't want us to talk about and um you know politics we're all political how do you leave how do you leave politics out of a book when you're like you know like covering leaked data sets of like police documents or you know russia during a war or or whatever like i don't really see how to leave politics how that's even possible well let's just talk about you know leaks of non-controversial places like you know macy's or something i don't know what they want but then like what's the new value to like why does anybody care about about that i mean obviously privacy but like like i feel like that's that's where where it you will want to report on that it's like all of these macy's customers uh were hacking their information was leaked yeah like the actual like revelations the big stories that change things it's not going to be there that's what they're afraid that that characterization that reply uh in this context actually it i mean it it kind of it nullifies itself it's the it functionally using these techniques there there's no application in in a situation that is not inherently got some political angle to it or some um action because they're they're data sets that are from breaches so inherently it's sort of an ignorant comment yeah yeah so so you're on amazon so uh people can get the book through amazon uh but i i saw on your page it's amazon if you must yeah amazon is uh pretty evil um uh yeah so if you want to get the book the so if you go to uh hacks and leaks.com and and click buy uh i have three options and basically um buying directly from the publisher no starch press is a good way of doing it and no starch is great and actually if you wanted to buy it from no search uh you'll they have uh discounts all the time and actually if you wanted to wait until hope um and i'm sure they'll have uh copies of it at hope uh they always have like discounts while they're at conferences and stuff and i hope you'll be at hope signing i hope you'll be at hope signing books too yeah i would love to be at hope signing books and in fact i've been meaning to i haven't done it yet but um i noticed the call for papers is open and i want to submit a talk about my book um but uh but yeah i'll total i'm totally planning on coming to hope and i went last time and it was great it was my first time in queens actually what do you think of queens what do you think of queens being a first time you know i kind of loved it i like it was it was kind of like hard to get to but once you're there like i think i stayed in a airbnb kind of near um the university okay and i really liked it like like i felt like it was a whole different part of new york city that i hadn't really experienced and that it was very like i don't know a lot more relaxing than like manhattan and even brooklyn and like yeah i liked it i've never lived in new york but um but but yeah i definitely i definitely enjoyed queens and so i'm excited it's gotten a lot easier to get to the transit has improved significantly and also um uh you're only minutes away from the biggest chinatown in the world outside of china so that's that's something right there i was really like when i heard about that i was super excited and uh and so like when i was at hope last time i went to the biggest chinatown i went kind of late and a lot of things were closed but i found like this amazing like hot pot restaurant and it was very cool yeah now we went at like two in the morning and and found things on a sunday so that was incredible nice um oh yeah but so you can buy my book from no starch press and if you buy a copy of the physical book then they give you the ebook for free too which is like the pdf or the epub or the mobi like all of those um so so so that's cool or you could just buy the ebook it's a little cheaper um or you there's a link to a bookshop.org that you can um order online and that's basically like a way more ethical way of buying books than buying them from amazon because um bookshop.org actually like uh if you want to you can choose your favorite local bookshop and a chunk of all of the things that you buy will go a chunk of the money will go to that bookshop but if you don't choose one then distribute it between all these local bookshops so it's a way of actually supporting local bookshops but still just ordering it online and getting it shipped to you um and then also like you can buy it on amazon um and it's in the it's in amazon it's on in the kindle store and all that um uh but if you have a local bookshop you could actually just go to them and ask them to to order the book for you and they will um and so that it gets even more money to your local bookshop if you want to do that um and also like if you all are are able to go to the library and like request that the library get a copy of the book yes good idea it doesn't it doesn't seem like there's a a like global centralized way of of doing that i think it really helps if just someone who that's actually their library goes in and asks uh-huh just going into your library that's a good idea people need to do that you know yes i did that to my in my library it was great i mean i guess i i said that i was the author but like they were just like oh yeah absolutely we'll get it and then they uh uh actually i should go check i wonder if they have it now you could probably host a signing there very tomorrow you could host a signing there as well absolutely go ahead kyle i just wanted to say that's a great idea as far as housing a lot of people i know volunteering and attending the conference uh were able to go in on a place and and that that helps locally and uh the other thing about libraries it's so crucial i mean we're living in the information age that is a resource those uh we've had questions um we have sometimes people accessing um the new system that we developed for digital subscriptions and and just generally um you know we we cater to people across age groups and and uh people have varying levels of experience with technology and that is something that we um think about and will advise people if they don't have friends or family that can help navigate them through um uncompressing a file or um you know using something in a particular uh operating system that is the one that they have access to but they're inexperienced and they're literally trying to access information that is exactly what librarians do is help people access information and answer questions and walk them through that stuff um and a lot of them those uh institutions have workshops and and uh and people available that they can help with that uh especially to those that that don't have uh uh family members or individuals around them that that can help and and uh guide them through a lot of that process yeah libraries are amazing and this is sort of off topic but if you all don't know about it there's an app called libby where you can um uh put in any library cards that you have and then you can check out uh ebooks and audiobooks through your local library so you're like yeah so and then you can like get the ebooks delivered to a kindle or other ebook readers so like uh if you want to listen to a new audiobook you can just like put your library card in libby search for audiobooks that are available and then check one out and just listen to it and it's free because the library you just have to return it that means getting a library card people if you don't have one get one you need a library card because because it actually even though it's all digital and really i don't know it's all like artificial scarcity it still is like that your local library needs to have bought a license of this uh ebook or a license of this audiobook in order to check it out go ahead rob yeah and uh having done some work in the industry um your local library is because there's no centralized way to just request all libraries order something because the way libraries work they they serve their own community so your local library is uh it's their job to get the books in that your local area wants and uh so yeah everyone wherever you are you should go to your local library and you should request books you want and uh all the people at libraries whose job it is to select and order books love when that happens because that's a suggestion that they don't have to just come up with something they think might be something somebody wants because they actually have proof positive that it will serve one of their users so yes request micah's book from your library request all the books you like from your library and uh it'll be it'll be there for everyone especially this one because it's it's self-help and it's it's about going through and accessing and using tools with information self-help i like that yeah definitely definitely well you know also i was thinking this book is a great gift for for anyone that you think might have technical knowledge or just interest they won't be able to put it down right i mean it's just it's so it's so um um open and and uh easy to uh to walk through the various stages and boy the payoff is amazing yeah absolutely and like please i'm available if you have questions or if you are uh uh uh if you like end up like publishing a blog post with some like cool shit you found like let me know i'm i'm really into it all right gill any any questions from our from our chat listeners um are they chatting amongst themselves which is why i was always a critic of the chat they're listening um we had people ask about micah's twitter handle which he very graciously provided and um hang on we did get a yes if you're looking for micah um your uh information for mastodon and blue sky is available on the page for the book on hacksleaks.com but uh you can also find micah at micah f lee at twitter and uh at micah f lee at infosec dot exchange on mastodon um basically if you look for micah flea you'll find micah um and i um did want to share one very other one one good comment um part of the idea says our good friend listener lex as part of the idea is to shine a light onto things that need to be highlighted but as mike was describing earlier the decipherer can choose how widely to share the data which mitigates danger so i think very excellent cut to the heart of it um yes we what we we love hearing from you guys we have 53 people watching right now which is great um they're all listening intently we hope so they should be yeah um the mac geek says great show i'm enjoying the talk and yes um they are listening intently and if you guys want to be part of the conversation the chat is the way to do it this week uh not because we have rebel on the phone but because we have micah on the phone and um you can't call us but please do feel free to hop in the chat um share anything you might like with us and yeah that is true yes someone says we're listening not watching maybe someday that sticker will move you don't know well it's youtube technically it's a video but we're not going to put our faces on it um yes although talking of uh youtube we we did get a comment on mastodon uh referring to the fact that uh the youtube vendetta against firefox appears to be continuing as they're finding youtube is buffering like crazy which is especially funny for a video like ours which has no uh video movement so the bandwidth needed for it must be negligible compared to like an ht uh moving video and uh yeah a lot of people have been reporting over the past weeks that uh youtube has been uh slowing down for people using firefox especially using firefox with ad blockers and the grumblings are grumbling we don't have ads on our youtube uh feed here so why would it be buffering for us because youtube is punishing everyone using ad blockers or at least they're trying to and uh for a lot of people that's succeeding um usage of ad blockers has actually gone down a little bit uh among people who want to watch youtube in their browser you know we seem to be moving into a world of evil and we need all the tools we can to fight back this kind of uh corporate oppression of one sort or another um you know i was i i had this conspiracy theory that uh google was also uh uh making google meet work less well for firefox users because i use firefox all the time and um for years and years you couldn't have the like special the like uh what's it called the effects on google meet where you can like change your virtual background or like look like a dog or whatever unless you were using chrome and it just wasn't available when you go to it in firefox it's like sorry your browser is not supported and i'm like what is this like internet explorer but then as of like two months ago or something it just started working so i guess they updated google meet to support firefox so i think that my conspiracy theory was wrong well i i wouldn't let go of that conspiracy theory too quickly because uh there's certainly a lot of evil we can point to we we've encountered um our email about hope going into spam boxes our own staff people that are on the organizing committee uh mail to them from another member uh on a mailing list went into spam and and and it's just incredible that these companies can can block communications or uh the ability to see something uh just because they can and there are there are you hear about what um uh elon musk did with uh twitter with uh the t.co url shortener and like link time no basically like um i i can maybe try and see if i could find the actual uh like research that people did but i think the markup is this non-profit newsroom uh figured it out but basically when there's like a list of sites that uh twitter considered competitors and so that included mastodon and included um i think blue sky and i think also um uh sub stack and patreon and a few other things and any links to those uh the t.co url shortener would work but it would take an extra like 500 milliseconds so if you click on a mastodon link you have to wait a second or like half a second before it redirects but if you click on anything else it redirects immediately and basically they were just trying to make it like like make the ui of their competitors feel worse wow i mean it doesn't sound like much time but i guess it adds up yeah yeah i mean it's not much time but it's definitely like like it's one of those things that like annoys you when and it's like puts friction and you're just like uh i'm not going to click on these links anymore because it's slow right right um it makes it feel like you know twitter is nice and fast but these other sites suck you know has has twitter had a data set uh released or or found anywhere i'd like to jump on that so so i mean there was the twitter file which uh uh i don't really think is that was not a data set that was released because it wasn't public it was like a bunch of like conservative journalists that were like handpicked by elon musk to like share data internally it was more like an authorized leak right um but i was thinking that if there is like a big data leak from twitter it should be called the x file oh wow of course that makes perfect sense yeah i would be the one good result if their name change yeah then then i'll say x that'll make me say x wow uh go ahead alex well i was just going to suggest that we give out the phone number how can we do that alex because mike is on the phone because mike is only have one phone so we can't do that online yeah that's the whole point otherwise you would have been hearing a rebel diatribe by now but by the way mike a rebel is one of our regular callers who basically stays on for about 10 or 15 minutes despite every attempt oh there's no basically just stop with that talk right now oh it's it's just something we've learned to swallow and um yeah but that's why we're asking people on the chat to ask questions or people need to ask questions yes yes very good yeah well no i i think this has been a fantastic show and i think it's great to to have you on mike and i think um i think this will be a really interesting hot topic i'd hope too so this will be this will be excellent yeah really yeah i'm excited i i really am uh intrigued by uh some of these tools i hope people with idle machines start start building their own sort of investigative labs and it's just a great step by step so thanks for putting this out into the world to uh really get people up to speed on what it takes to go through the kind of data that um we're talking about all the time and then that is all around us if you're interested in in building your own investigative lab you should check out chapter five which is about alice which is um basically software you could run it it's it's it's meant to be on like on a server and multiple people can use it but you could also run it locally on your laptop and docker and it's basically lets you index data sets so it doesn't it doesn't work with everything but with with most data sets that you get a hold of you can basically like run an aleph server and then you could you could just pump gigabytes of data into it and it'll look at each document and extract all of the text and like ocr the images and all sorts of stuff and then make it searchable for you and then you can also um uh use it to like find connections between multiple data sets and things like that and it's very cool and it's like it's what i think of when i think of building your own little data lab for uh like leased data sets i love that yeah um because we we have a lot of spare and like old storage and and just i think people should really dig through their basements and think about all of the different possibilities when they're repurposing equipment and yeah i mean maybe it uses a little bit more power but if it's doing something that um that takes advantage of the the kinds of tools and and puts puts information together that is valuable it'll be worth that extra power and i just think yeah it's it's great to give people an idea that this can this is this is what it's used for but it can be used for anything and and having that kind of um drive to purpose build stuff that you can apply to all kinds of other problem solving is is just really empowering i really i know that there's a lot of uh hackers out there that are into problem solving that like uh working with equipment and uh and breathing new life into it that's that's something that i've done a lot of and and and we're we have things that are just looking for for things to do and um i had one more question that that you touched on earlier how far out do you think um we are from having some of those ai uh tools that work offline how long do you think it'll be before we can really bring those into our our little labs and and into things that we're putting together ourselves with with off-the-shelf parts honestly there's already off-the-shelf parts that work pretty well and a lot of the work that could be done is making them easy to use um i don't know if you if you're familiar with hugging face uh hugging face.co it's basically like uh it's like github or something except instead of uh source code repositories it's machine learning models and they're like almost all like open source and you so you can just go in there and search for different types of models and um uh i've only played with it a little bit but it's really impressive like you could actually like none of it's going to be as fast or as as good as like chat gpt like the um the llms are trained on much smaller sets but they're still trained on enough that you know they can summarize documents for you and stuff and you can run them directly on your um on your laptop and so like like one that i've used a bunch is called whisper and it's actually wasn't released by open ai but it's open source um let me see open ai with if you just search for open ai whisper you'll find it um and this is a uh text or a speech to text uh transcription uh machine learning model and it's really cool what you can do is like um i've heard of people like you can just like download youtube videos and then run it run the video through whisper and then you just get a transcript of the video and it does like a very good job at it and it can also even like uh translate stuff into english it can't translate it into other languages but if you find like you know a speech in russian you can run that through whisper and then you get an english translation in text that you can just read um and i found that like it totally works on my laptop and it works fine it's a little bit slow so like if i have like 10 minutes of audio it takes about 20 minutes to process it but like that's not that bad no so i i feel like there's actually like a good amount of open source uh ai stuff that already exists and that the hard part is that like you have to be a python programmer you have to like write a little script to do it and there isn't just some like easy to use software that you can just like that anyone can just install you have to be kind of nerdy about it and like experiment with it some but i feel like a lot of that stuff is already is already there they're just they haven't been the pieces haven't been put together yet to make usable tools and gila you have something we have a listener question um micah what's the process of finding a publisher and getting a book like this published um so no starch is my publisher and actually if you go to no starch dot com and up at the top of the website you click right for us um no starch is actually like they're very chill and they're very uh transparent about how everything works um and they're probably one of the easiest publishers to work with um uh and so you can actually just like email them a book proposal and if if they're into it then uh uh they they very likely will will get it published um this is the only book that i've ever tried to get published and i only actually tried to get it published through no starts because um uh i like no starts books and it was basically like the first i i basically like had this idea for a book that i've been thinking of for a while um and then i emailed them and they were like really excited about it and i was like great and that was kind of bad um uh but so i'm sure the process is different in different ways and and i've actually been like totally off topic uh experimenting with writing a fiction and learning about how that publishing world works and it's entirely different um but uh uh no starch is my only experience and they're very easy to work with and so so if you are wanting to write a book like a technical book um through no starch then just read their like right for us page and uh uh uh yeah i i think you could probably you could probably get it done it is a lot of work to write a book um you have to like read your own book at least like 20 times you have to go through uh like each chapter get several rounds of editing and stuff like that um but uh but yeah it's very cool i'm i'm very glad i did it yeah i guess it's um uh fair to say that uh without no starch this book wouldn't have been published right at least not easily yeah yeah yeah not easily i mean i i mean i don't know like i think that that they were just very enthusiastic about it like i it definitely would have been a much harder thing for me um uh and i really like no starch they're like always at the conferences i go to yes agreed and you know so i guess that's reason enough for people if you want to buy the book buy it through no starch and and look through no starch's catalog and and see what else they have because they they have a history of publishing really interesting relevant material uh no starch that no starch press no starch.com no starch.com no starch.com uh okay uh rob and then alex hey um talking of uh no starch i mean we've had uh you know friend of the show cory doctorow has often spoken about how he also puts his work out uh as you have uh simultaneously free online under creative commons at the same time as he's publishing it and he's spoken about having to talk to people in the traditional publishing world and convince them that this wasn't um a ridiculous idea um did you did you find no starch to be uh chill about that as well yeah no starch was very chill about that and i think that also partially because a lot of their other authors have have done similar things and other authors have like specifically wanted to release their books under creative commons licenses um so they have like a lot of experience with it um i mean personally i think that if people want my book they're going to pirate it and that's fine because i want more people to read it and i think it just makes sense to make it easier and like i i guess i don't really have real numbers but i think that the more the more the book is getting spread around to everybody probably the more people are going to buy it anyway anyway you know like i don't think that it's like a every single person that like yes that is able to read a copy of it for free would have bought it i think that you know if someone reads it for free and then they like it and they talk about it other people are going to buy it from that and so yeah i don't know i just feel like making it free is is probably good business sense anyway um i mean i don't know this comes from the whole like the the pirate bay days the whole that's that that's that ideology that i that i probably have retained well we found that the community tends to support that which it values and uh yeah there'll be some copying going on but um uh you know people will realize i'll see the connection if uh this is not supported it's not going to continue and and um it's not a very hard calculation to make and that also applies uh in how you publish if you publish digital material uh do you want people to have the ability to copy it onto a different device for us you know it's a very short question of course people should have every right as opposed to um uh with amazon's way of doing it where uh basically the information can disappear from your kindle or it can be um prevented from being copied to other devices so we find the most support comes from people uh who are able to appreciate the fact that they can uh copy a magazine from their laptop to their their phone to uh whatever other device they can think of that they can they can read it on see i should check the kindle version of my book and make sure that it's crm free i think it should be but i should verify yeah it's good to know it's good to know and and you know with with amazon you don't really have the amount of control you should have uh they wouldn't even tell us who the subscribers were we couldn't address them we had to trick them we had to put out a farewell issue before they cut off magazine subscriptions last summer and uh and basically uh tell people how to subscribe directly through us and still get the magazine on the kindle but just not use amazon so that was that was fun alex go ahead yeah sure you know mike as as uh as a lawyer who's also a coder and and a hacker i also don't have a uh computer science background didn't study computer science or computer engineering i in fact i studied philosophy as as an undergraduate but one of the things that i've found to be most useful when coding is writing effective loops like you know even in bash you know it doesn't even have to be in something as complicated as python but just figuring out how to iterate through data you know everything for every domain in this particular text file or for every you know whatever the hell it is you know just the loops can be so uh you know incredibly powerful i think and and i'm wondering you know what you think the most basic but yet effective programming technique is in in your experience yeah i mean i agree with you like specifically for for for data sets like loops are amazing and in fact like um so the the structure of my book is like it starts out with some like here's how some computer security stuff uh like using password managers a bit and and here's how to use bit torrent here's how to download data um but then it moves on to like the technical stuff which is like how to use the terminal and then it moves on to python but like the beginning of the terminal section is like um you download blue leaks and now you have a folder with like 200 uh like 70 zip files and it teaches you how to use a for loop and bash to unzip them all in a single command and you could like right click on each one and go to unzip but this saves a lot of time and then and then it like goes on to like here's how like using a for loop is really really really really a common thing and a really powerful thing and it means that instead of having it basically lets you automate stuff instead of having to do this thing a hundred times or a thousand times or a million times manually you do it once and then you just automate it in a loop and i completely agree with that and then like after after like you know it introduces loops by unzipping a bunch of files which is you know a common task um but then it does the same sort of thing when it goes into python it's like you're in python and it's like okay here's how you uh open a spreadsheet and then you loop through all the rows and then you can just loop through millions of rows and and run the same block of code um uh yeah so i guess i wanted seconds that loops are incredibly powerful and are one of the ways that make it so that um it's possible for a mere human to sift through millions and millions and millions of records um um i mean i'm sure there's lots of other powerful uh things like i i guess json is a really powerful way of structuring like arbitrarily complex data and there's a whole like chapter on json and like and actually the example for that is like uh uh from uh a russian ransomware gang called conti they uh got hacked right after uh or i guess i guess there were i think i believe that they were infiltrated by a ukrainian guy who was like a security researcher who was infiltrating them already then russia invaded ukraine and conti um kind of declared its support for russia and threatened to like attack critical infrastructure of anyone who goes against russia and then conti got like like gigabytes of data leaks and it included all of their internal chat logs and um those were all in json format and so part of the the book shows you how to like load this json file and then how to actually like look through the chat logs using like four loops and very simple stuff like all all of python is like very concise and short and and pretty easy to understand there's like little 10 lines of code that do these things but they're all incredibly powerful things um yeah yeah it's that that's fantastic i went through those conti leaks myself as well because it was fascinating because i've dealt with conti um quite a bit as a as a ransomware threat actor and and dealt with quite a few of their incidents and i will say though they they had excellent customer service you know much better than most uh technical uh you know any kind of tech service you get from uh any other companies you had to fill out a survey after you dealt with them probably i wouldn't be surprised everybody wants a goddamn survey now but you know one of the things that your whole story about loops and and the power of it and json i think is funny it reminds me of a couple of years ago i had a case where uh i i got dumped on me just a massive amount of transcripts and pdfs from like years of of hearings and i had to figure out um from all these these transcripts you know any references to yahoo um this was about you know potential yahoo breach and whatnot and i remember saying on the air like you know i got all these these pdfs and things i wish i you know that they were text files and i could go through them and um but you know it's really hard and then one of our listeners wrote to us i think and said no there's this there's this linux-based command line tool called grep pdf or pdf grep and i literally just wrote a for loop script that said go through every single file in this particular directory and search for yahoo and then because it had all of the structures and the regex that was associated with grep itself but yet was specifically designed for pdfs i could then have it give me the context around any reference to yahoo as well so give me 10 lines above and 10 lines below and i will tell you it saved me probably 40 50 hours of going through these transcripts just writing a for loop to do this so it's really incredible that is also another one of those amazing tools um i never actually heard of pdf grep um but i didn't know somebody told me what i've used before is a pdf to text which uh maybe part of like poplar or something i forgot which package it comes from but pdf to text can just like convert pdf it just extracts the text content from it and so what i probably would have done is that in two steps like one convert all the pdf to text files and then grep through the text files with the like getting the context around it um and then also there's alice that that thing that i was talking about you can totally just like like give it a folder with thousands of pdfs and then it'll just crunch through them and then you can search it and but it's like really nice and easy to use and stuff like that wow fantastic how do you spell that uh a l e ph it's um got it yeah it's occrp makes it um it's the organized crime and corruption reporting projects um uh they do a lot of like uh organized crime stuff in eastern europe um but like docs.alice.occrp.org is the website for the software and it's open source um and yeah there's a whole chapter on on how to use it uh michael we're in our last couple of minutes but uh i'd just like to ask if if there are people out there i mean it's it's obvious how passionate uh we all are about uh coding and and getting things to work but i imagine some readers might run into some difficulty or just have mental roadblocks towards this kind of thing um is there any place they can go to get assistance or guidance um that's a good question i mean there's like tons and tons of resources um for like my book covers a lot of different technologies um like like i think stack overflow is probably going to be a common place um but uh uh yeah i don't actually have like a chat room or anything set up like you're welcome to email me personally um i as long as i don't get swarmed and overflowing with email i'm happy to just help people who are interested in it um uh but yeah like i think uh uh asking questions on social media um and and maybe i could like respond to help publicly to help more people um yeah i wish i had a better answer no that's that's fine that's that's that's more than i would do actually uh but on on the subject of uh social media do you want to give out any any handles or addresses or things like that in this uh uh fractured and and confusing time yeah so i'm um on on mastodon i'm uh at micah f lee at imposex dot exchange um and i'm blue sky i'm micah f lee dot com um and actually my website is micah f lee dot com and if you go to that and click on about it just has links to everything else that's probably the easiest um uh yeah so you go to micah f lee dot com and the website for the book is hacks and links dot com and the book is hacks leaks and revelations and um i have a feeling a lot of people are going to be plunging into it in the uh in the weeks months ahead and we look forward to seeing you at the conference this summer yeah i'm excited all right thank you thanks micah take care bye and i guess that's going to do it for us here and off the hook over time so thanks everybody we'll uh we'll meet here again next week alex looks like you have something to say yeah i just thought that was a great show it was excellent to have mike on fantastic let our listeners decide if it's a great show or not you can write to us oth at 2600.com and tell us if it was a good show or bad show or uh if you don't care in which case you probably won't write an email yes and um i encourage everyone to be political whether they're hacking or not yes especially if people tell you not to yeah yeah do the most non-political thing you know like buying ice cream and make it political yeah all right show them you can put it anywhere um all right that's that's it we'll see you next week good night