Yanukovych leaks

by mxfh • 12 years ago

321 87 12 years ago

nailer• 12 years ago

They could crowdsource finding interesting stuff - eg, the Guardian had an app where members of the public were show random expense reports from politicians, and could flag unusual/odd expenses.

danohuiginn5• 12 years ago

That's definitely the plan. We've been working flat out on this for the past few days, and the immediate priority is getting the documents preserved. [many of them were waterlogged, and have to be separated and dried in the presidential sauna]

But crowdsourcing is certainly going to happen

sp3322• 12 years ago

Could you get some pics of drying the docs in the sauna? That would be amazing!

brador• 12 years ago

What if some of the documents contain private information of non-involved individuals? Any steps being taken to protect their details?

danso• 12 years ago

I'm not ignorant of the needs and concerns of self-promotion in order to build a popular campaign...but I hope they have a technical advisor who will, at some point, inform them about the technique of OCR and how a large hashtag-watermark can obstruct such a technique.

Also, minor detail, but the images should also be rotated to their proper orientation. Crowdsourcing data collection has to be as frictionless as possible, and this is an easy fix.

Depending on how many actual documents there are (i.e. how many pages are in those 200 folders), it might be worth it to go the route of ProPublica's "Free the Files" project, in which they built a mini-app that let people voluntarily transcribe the important fields in each document:

https://www.propublica.org/series/free-the-files

Their Al Shaw wrote a piece about designing for efficient crowd-sourcing:

http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/casino-driven-design

They even open-sourced the Rails plugin for it:

http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/transcribable-free-the-...

danohuiginn5• 12 years ago

the images should also be rotated to their proper orientation

there's a rotate button when you click through to the detail page. We're tracking where images get rotated to, and setting the orientation according to that. It's still a bit buggy, but we're getting there

the technique of OCR and how a large hashtag-watermark can obstruct such a technique

We're running OCR over non-watermarked versions. We're hoping to have a search function up later today

Thanks for the links -- we'll look at them, and see what we can use

Alekanekelo• 12 years ago

there's a rotate button when you click through to the detail page.

When rotating some of the images (for example Img 999) it seems to cut the edges of the image off and clicking to zoom doesn't help.

danohuiginn5• 12 years ago

One of the participants here.

It's been a crazy few days. We have documents drying in the former president's sauna, prosecutors waiting for each file to be scanned before confiscating it, and an incredible group of journalists working night and day to save as many documents as possible.

A few articles with more background: http://gijn.org/2014/02/25/yanukovychleaks-org-how-ukraine-j... http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/ukrainian-journa... http://gijn.org/2014/02/27/yanukovychleaks-update-the-projec...

moneyries2• 12 years ago

hey there - i'm a reporter w/ @mashable, wondering if you might be free for to do a quick Q&A? sorry to barge in on the thread but this is super interesting to me personally. - @moneyries / moneyries at gmail.

Sprint4• 12 years ago

Please let them do their important real work instead of your pseudo-journalism about social media.

nicholassmith• 12 years ago

There's an email address listed on their profile, might be worth trying that.

JetSpiegel2• 12 years ago

Where's you public key?

krenoten6• 12 years ago

I hope you are deliberately lying about where this is still going on, otherwise why are you jeopardizing this potentially important operation by bragging about where you're conducting it? You are only inviting trouble from the thugs.

Would the downvoter care to come out of their dark corner and explain why I am wrong?

maaarghk• 12 years ago

Not the downvoter and don't think it's worth a downvote but don't think the comment said anything not mentioned in (at least) the NY times article.

willvarfar• 12 years ago

I've seen it on the BBC news. The place is swarming with activists and reporters. Its definitely not being done in secret.

gesman2• 12 years ago

For the ones who have hard time remembering how to spell it:

http://c.gg/yl

kwamenum86• 12 years ago

Expert troll?

davidrudder2• 12 years ago

I took the admittedly stupid approach of just clicking the link, while at work, with my office door open. As it turns out, it's on the up-and-up, all good, works as expected.

kmfrk• 12 years ago

It looks like the photos are upside-down, when you go to a specific page and click to zoom in.

Didn't know where else to report it.

sp3322• 12 years ago

The detail page has a "Rotate" button, down next to "Next" and "Previous".

spoiledtechie• 12 years ago

Whats the site powered by? Did you just throw it together or is it a CMS?

pudo2• 12 years ago

Django, MySQL, S3+CloudFront, Tesseract and lots of duct tape...

donohoe• 12 years ago

You should look at DocumentCloud and see if it would be helpful for hosting and managing the documents you're finding.

http://www.documentcloud.org/home

https://github.com/documentcloud

It might be ideal for your needs. The project uses Tesseract‘s OCR to read documents and OpenCalais to pull data from them, including key people, places, and dates.

jdimov• 12 years ago

I doubt Tesseract will do well with handwritten Ukrainian... and I am positive OpenCalais won't detect anything in that language.

pudo2• 12 years ago

The project initially used DocumentCloud, but I guess that's built for scenarios which are a little less horrible than single-page JPEGs coming in via FTP.

Tesseract has been working beautifully, we've got the first 1500 documents sent through it. Unfortunately, we don't know the language of each document (trying to get up some crowdsourcing for that), so each gets sent through three times (eng, rus, ukr). Finally, all versions are indexed in ElasticSearch. If anyone has a neater way of doing this (e.g. a good, Python-based language detector), please shout!

thorntonbf• 12 years ago

Corrupt governments' greatest nightmare is transparency.

It's amazing that these documents were discarded so carelessly. That alone probably says a lot about the competency of the Yanukovych government at large.

Good luck and Godspeed! Here's hoping that some of the information found here can be used as evidence and will speed the transition to a better government. Stay safe out there.

rdtsc• 12 years ago

It's amazing that these documents were discarded so carelessly.

If there are criminals (and there are) at least let's hope they are incompetent and stupid they can be found and caught easily. Or that those chasing them a fast enough for the criminals to make mistakes on their way out.

The former East German government in its final days tried to shred documents, and it did. It left mountains of single strip shredded documents. Well, it turns out it is possible to painstakingly reconstruct those. There is software that can help as well.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/puzzling-togethe...

They should have burt them, then mixed the ash with water and dumped it in a landfill, but, well glad there were not competent enough or these enacting the change were coming fast enough on their heels.

rjzzleep• 12 years ago

name one government that is not corrupt

edit: funny i'd like to know what the down vote is about. it's not a snarky response i'm being full serious here right now. i don't know a single one. that's not how governments operate

mpyne2• 12 years ago

I wish you guys all the best. :)

I've been arguing with a friend of mine the past few days who's convinced all of this is just some kind of CIA operation to get back at Putin for reasons. Or something. Also that people should never be able to protest about their "democratically-elected government".

mladenkovacevic2• 12 years ago

The very idea that CIA would somehow be involved in a violent and coordinated coup for the purposes of advancing its geopolitical interests.... Somebody get your friend a tinfoil hat amiright or amiright!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_re...

shirman• 12 years ago

Слава Украине! И привет из Москвы ;)

chatman• 12 years ago

This doesn't belong here at Hacker News.

orf• 12 years ago

Mind explaining why?

joshmlewis• 12 years ago

Why not?

Edit: Think hard about your answer because to me it seems like this is a beautiful example of the power of technology outside of the norm here in the states.

colinramsay• 12 years ago

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link."

jnbiche• 12 years ago

Strongly disagree. This is the epitome of the hacker mentality. Just because it's not being applied toward building a company doesn't mean it's not worthy of discussion.

fnordfnordfnord• 12 years ago

Would you like to instead:

  talk about how to pivot yanukovychleaks.org to a billion dollar startup idea.

  Critique their choice of web framework.

  Talk about how to optimize bandwidth usage.

  Critique other design choices, usage/non-usage of CSS

  Discuss SEO strategies?

  Other?

ansimionescu• 12 years ago

I wish there were more JavaScript posts. Did you know you can do functional programming with it?! /s

borplk• 12 years ago

He's just mad they are not using Erlang

astrodust• 12 years ago

Overthrowing the government and breaking down walls that prevent transparency is surely an epic "hack" in the best sense of the word.

Note to USA: You could learn from this.

jmnicolas3• 12 years ago

This is in Russian (or Ukrainian) ... are the HN readers supposed to read fluently Cyrillic ?

krenoten6• 12 years ago

I can fluently read Cyrillic. I learned it as a child in a few minutes for fun. It's fluently reading any actual language written in Cyrillic that gets me :P

rocky11382• 12 years ago

It is English, as well. Look at the right-hand side of the screen.

DominoTree• 12 years ago

I'm pretty sure he meant the actual documents and not the header text.

Cthulhu_• 12 years ago

assuming all of HN only knows english

jmnicolas3• 12 years ago

You know what, I'm French ... but when I come on HN I expect to do my reading in English unless otherwise specified in the title of the thread.

shitgoose• 12 years ago

It is Ukrainian.

rocky11382• 12 years ago

This should really be served with https.

krenoten6• 12 years ago

Why? Any snooper still sees a DNS lookup for this domain followed by a connection to it. This is not such a dynamic site - it's fairly obvious what you will be accessing.

bdamm• 12 years ago

A site like this can have interesting corners not easily found. The knowledge that you know about such corners could itself be used against you. That's a good reason to serve it up as https.

lifeisstillgood• 12 years ago

This is one of those Walls coming down moments for me.

I have banged on about how governments and states are losing their privacy as much as individuals - and whilst this is happening after a political crisis, it is increidble to see a few determined hackers and some simple off the shelf equipment is throwing open the doors to a hidden state. Truly eye-opening, and something we should look for in our nice safe democracies.

PS Plus I know a few Ukrainians and hope that this can get resolved with no further bloodshed.

rogerthis• 12 years ago

I'll take the images to the priest of the catholic ukranian parish I attend...

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

I think this is awesome, I worry about it triggering a Russian response if there is something in there which ties back to the Putin administration.

What I really like is way in which Ukraine is going about this, unlike the Mideast (Egypt comes to mind), where it seems the only things the people who took over cared about was exacting retribution on the former government, rather than having "Make a stable and just government" as their first priority, and "Investigate and punish any crimes that may have occurred" as their second priority.

mladenkovacevic2• 12 years ago

The first thing this new "government" did before doing anything else was repeal a law that allows regional rights to minority languages (Russian included) and demanded that the International Criminal Court charge the democratically elected Yanukovich with crimes against humanity.

They are only now trying to name an interim government. As far as how stable this government will be that is left to be seen, but if the US was willing to invest some resources in supporting the revolution and several of the candidates being named this week, as the assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland seems to suggest in this intimate conversation (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957), perhaps they'll be willing to bail out Ukraine's economy?

Yanukovych leaks

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