FSE meets the FBI

Summary

FSE Meets the FBI!Pete, Apr 06, 2025I have for you a bizarre tale of scrapers, feds, data poisoning, Torswats, and everyone's favorite fedi instance. It veers technical, because I suspect it will be of interest to other people running servers with UGC (i.e., every fedi instance), and also because the mechanics of how I figured out what I figured out might be useful. It's also got information about how the FBI collects data, which is of interest to everyone, but especially US citizens. I have a few pieces of the puzzle, maybe someone with interlocking pieces can say more; I'm happy to compare notes. To summarize, the FBI pays some shady companies to scrape data, the data is scanned for keywords (yep, just like CARNIVORE). Links and content are then fed into Facebook, organized by topic based on the keywords. Some rudimentary analysis is performed (sentiment analysis at least, but as friendly as Microsoft is with the feds, and as LLMs have gotten popular, the influence of machines has probably expanded) and perused by agents, using some FBI internal interface. The TL;DR above probably implies this, but this is the longest post on here to date, by a wide margin. I expect that most people will skip around instead of reading straight through: probably only people running instances are going to be interested in the technical parts, and when building out the chronology I erred on the side of providing too much information rather than simplifying. A note about links that go to fedi sites: some of them (like the main FSE site) are down, but if you put the links into your own instance's search box, you can generally find the post (if it federated; obviously if your instance is newer or if it's configured to scrub old posts, you might not have it) and view it on your own instance. In either case, it's generally better to try searching for the post's URL on your home instance, whether that instance is currently live or not, because then you can interact with it locally. (FSE is...