Parler Users Breached Deep Inside U.S. Capitol Building, GPS Data Shows

[Nevilledog]

https://gizmodo.com/parler-users-breached-deep-inside-u-s-capitol-building-1846042905?rev=1610480731991

At least several users of the far-right social network Parler appear to be among the hoard of rioters that managed to penetrate deep inside the U.S. Capitol building and into areas normally restricted to the public, according to GPS metadata linked to videos posted to the platform the day of insurrection in Washington.

The data, obtained by a computer hacker through legal means ahead of Parler’s shutdown on Monday, offers a bird’s eye view of its users swarming the Capitol grounds after receiving encouragement from President Trump — and during a violent breach that sent lawmakers and Capitol Hill visitors scrambling amid gunshots and calls for their death. GPS coordinates taken from 618 Parler videos analyzed by Gizmodo has already been sought after by FBI as part of a sweeping nationwide search for potential suspects, at least 20 of whom are already in custody.

The siege on January 6, which lasted approximately two hours, resulted in five deaths, including that of a Capitol police officer whom authorities say was bludgeoned with a fire extinguisher and later succumbed to his injuries. Windows were smashed, tables overturned, and graffiti scrawled and scratched into the walls of the 220-year-old building—some calling for the murders of journalists sheltering in place nearby.

Gizmodo has mapped nearly 70,000 geo-located Parler posts and on Tuesday isolated hundreds published on January 6 near the Capitol where a mob of pro-Trump supporters had hoped to overturn a democratic election and keep their president in power. The data shows Parler users posting all throughout the day, documenting their march from the National Mall to Capitol Hill where the violent insurrection ensued.

*snip*

[SWBTATTReg]

1. and now Parler is shut down. These thugs have cost themselves all sorts of platforms to vent and

rage off of. Anywhere they go will be the same, the platforms will have to take them off or be shut down themselves.

[Generic Other]

2. A lot of phones about to be confiscated?

Busy signals...

[woodsprite]

3. Wonder how many of those that got that far were Russian or Russian assets. nt

[njhoneybadger]

4. So why didn't the FBI hack that information if it was legal.

I'm losing faith in our Intelligence Community. The FBI under the Trump Administration has a 10 Billion dollar annual budget and if it wasn't for that private hacker they wouldn't have that vital Parler information.
Kind of looks like they really did't want it.

[stillcool]

5. wonder if they checked for bombs, etc...

setting up for next time. Probably not. So highly unlikely anything like that would happen.

[Curbside]

6. Cambridge Analytica is involved

January 12, 2021
Notably, conservative billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, are investors in the platform. Rebekah Mercer helped co-found it with Matze. The Mercers are well known for their investments in other conservative causes, including Nigel Farage’s Brexit campaign, Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica. The connection to Cambridge Analytica has, in particular, alarmed experts, who worry that Parler may harvest unnecessary data from unwitting users.

Parler’s privacy policy doesn’t put to rest concerns about user privacy, either: The policy says that Parler has permission to collect a vast amount of personal information, and gives its members much less control than mainstream platforms over what that data can be used for.
https://theconversation.com/big-techs-rejection-of-parler-shuts-down-a-site-favored-by-trump-supporters-and-used-by-participants-in-the-us-capitol-insurrection-153070

Cambridge Analytica "died" in May 2018 but it is still twitching.
Parler launched in August 2018.

02/19/2020
Oczkowski signed on with Cambridge in 2015, after spending nearly three years working as chief digital officer for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. As one of around a dozen Cambridge employees dispatched to the Trump campaign’s San Antonio outpost, Oczkowski played a key role in constructing what became known as Project Alamo, a massive online campaign — much of it orchestrated through Facebook advertising — that helped to propel Trump to the White House.

The U.K.-based Cambridge assisted Ted Cruz early in the 2016 campaign but began working for Trump once he emerged from the Republican primary. The ties between the data firm and Trumpworld ran deep. Steve Bannon, a onetime Cambridge board member, eventually became Trump’s chief strategist. Trump mega-donor Robert Mercer was also a major funder of the firm.

While many in Trumpworld were skeptical of Cambridge’s psychographics-focused approach, they felt that employees such as Oczkowski could be helpful, with his digital and data experience under Walker making him valuable to the Trump campaign.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/19/trump-cambridge-analytica-oczkowski-114075

Jennifer and Rebekah Mercer, daughters of wealthy businessman Robert Mercer who created and bankrolled Cambridge Analytica, are now the directors of Emerdata, a firm that describes itself as a “data processing, hosting and related activities” organization. With them is also former Cambridge Analytica’s acting CEO and data wizard, Dr. Alexander Taylor, alongside several other high-profile former employees, such as Julian Wheatland, who is also a director within the SCL network of organizations. Another director within Emerdata is Chinese businessman Johnson Chun Shun Ko, who is also deputy chairman and executive director of Frontier Services Group, a private security firm which mostly operates in Africa, who is chaired by US businessman Erik Prince, founder of the controversial private military group Blackwater USA.

Despite all of this, it appears that Cambridge Analytica’s data secrets have been shielded from justice and exposure by court-appointed administrators, who, instead of working independently on behalf of all creditors, have been found to receive payments from a shadow company set up by a band of executives linked to the former SCL organizations. The administrators, Mark Newman and Vincent Green, were accused of trying to liquidate the company before a full investigation could be held by the authorities.
https://www.opensourceinvestigations.com/elections/cambridge-analytica-what-comes-after-the-end/

[Curbside]

7. Trump Followers Who Stormed Capitol Have Erratic Voting Records

January 12, 2021
It’s not news that Trump’s political strength derives in large part from his ability to activate a large, reactionary, mostly white group of voters who hadn’t previously participated in the political process. He’d targeted such people all along. During the 2016 campaign, Sasha Issenberg and I visited Trump’s data headquarters, where his staff, including a team from Cambridge Analytica, explained how they’d identified and activated people previously alienated from politics whom they’d dubbed “disenfranchised new Republicans,” largely through Facebook.

Brad Parscale, Trump’s digital director at the time and later his first 2020 campaign manager, explained that capturing the loyalty of this group was a campaign goal. “We knew how valuable this would be from the outset,” Parscale told us in 2016. “We own the future of the Republican Party.”

Trump succeeded in leveraging the energy from these new Republicans to take control of the GOP. But for all the devotion congressional Republicans have shown Trump in return—including Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, and the majority of the House Republican caucus who voted to block Joe Biden’s victory—it’s very unclear from the voter data that the loyalty runs both ways.

Several of the people whose voting histories I reviewed hadn’t voted before Trump came along. They appear to be people Trump inspired by giving voice to particular grievances that no other politicians, Republican or Democrat, had before. Their chief loyalty lies with Trump, not the GOP, which worries elected Republicans, some of whom are indulging the fantasy that the election was stolen in order to maintain their support.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-12/capitol-siege-trump-supporters-arrested-weren-t-regular-voters

[Doremus]

9. An obnoxiously vocal trump supporter locally posts multiple rants about socialism, libtards, etc.

on social media. After Election Day she went on a particularly long diatribe and boasted of waiting in long lines to vote for trump, etc.

Just for fun my DD looked up her voting record. She's not even registered. lol.

I doubt she's alone among all these broken people.

[crickets]

8. This just goes to show that people paranoid about being microchipped

or receiving 'the mark of the beast' have not been paying attention. If you have a smart phone, you've been persuaded to willingly carry that microchip around with you wherever you go. Surprise! A crucial few of the mob at the Capitol may have used burn phones or only used radios to keep in touch with one another. Everybody else carried a big "hi, it's me!" sign around with them the entire time, whether they selfied or not.