TeleMessage Explorer: a new open-source research tool

Summary

I've spent the last week or two writing code to make sense of the massive hack of data from TeleMessage, the comically insecure company that makes a modified Signal app that Trump's former national security advisor Mike Waltz was caught using. I've decided to publish my code as open source in the hopes that other journalists will use it to find revelations in this dataset.While the source code for TeleMessage Explorer is public, it requires the TeleMessage dataset to use it. DDoSecrets is distributing this dataset to journalists and researchers with a history of reporting who agree to publish their findings. Contact DDoSecrets (not me) to request access.In this post, I explain how journalists who have access to the dataset can crunch the TeleMessage data and then explore it using TeleMessage Explorer. I also show a bunch of screenshots from the tool showing TeleMessage data, and I describe some details I found out about one 24-year-old (today is his birthday!) White House staffer bro who has Signal messages in this dataset.I used this tool myself to publish my recent post, TeleMessage customers include DC Police, Andreessen Horowitz, JP Morgan, and hundreds more. Reuters has reported on this dataset too, and I know plenty of other journalists and newsrooms currently have access to it. I'm crunching data and writing these newsletters in my free time. If you want to support my work, considering becoming a paid supporter. Become a paid supporter 💡TeleMessage Explorer is unpolished software. I built it initially just for my own use. I don't promise to maintain it, fix bugs, or anything else. If your newsroom wants help working with it, or wants specific features implemented or anything like that, contact me and I might be interested in consulting.Like BlueLeaks Explorer before itBack in 2020, in the middle of the Black Lives Matter uprising, someone hacked hundreds of law enforcement websites and exfiltrated about 270 GB of data. That dataset, called BlueLeaks (it's com...