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  1. Pinned Tweet
    52 minutes ago

    How does Russia issue fake passports to its operatives in Ukraine? We look at two examples to show how: Igor Bezler, whose fake identity is "Igor Beregovoy", and Oleg Ivannikov ("Andrey Laptev"). Their passport numbers are only 28 digits apart.

    1 reply 108 retweets 130 likes
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  2. 13 minutes ago

    P.S. Here's Bezler recently, hanging out in Crimea with Sergey Dubinsky, one of the four men named by the as prime suspects for the downing of MH17.

    1 reply 19 retweets 24 likes
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  3. 41 minutes ago

    Thanks to an absurd amount of incompetence and corruption in Russia's public sector, there are hundreds of leaked databases revealing all of this information. More on how the GRU is awful at keeping their operatives' identities secret here:

    1 reply 24 retweets 51 likes
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  4. 42 minutes ago

    We looked at this exact thing a while back with passports that the GRU had issued to Wagner fighters. Most of these fighters received their international passports only when joining Wagner, and got them all together, making their numbers almost sequential:

    2 replies 14 retweets 29 likes
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  5. 43 minutes ago

    The geniuses at Russia's passport office in Moscow processed the fake identities for both "Laptev" and "Beregovoy" at the same time, making their passport numbers only a couple dozen digits apart. Obviously, it's easy to search for all the passports with digits between them.

    1 reply 6 retweets 16 likes
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  6. 44 minutes ago

    Andrei Laptev is also known as the former Defense Minister of South Ossetia, from 2006-8. Oleg Ivannikov (his real identity) has maintained this persona for over 15 years.

    2 replies 5 retweets 16 likes
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  7. 46 minutes ago

    Neither Igor Beregovoy nor Andrei Laptev are real people -- they have no number (INN) on Russia's taxpayer database, as every real Russian adult does.

    1 reply 4 retweets 18 likes
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  8. 47 minutes ago

    Igor Bezler was issued a fake passport with a fake name (Beregovoy) by the Russian security services. If you do a wildcard search in a leaked database for his "passport neighbors", we find a GRU operative named Andrei Laptev.

    1 reply 5 retweets 21 likes
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  9. 50 minutes ago

    "Igor Nikolaevich Beregovoy", born 30/12/1965, flew to Simferopol on 27 Oct 2014. That same day, Igor Nikoalevich Bezler (born 30/12/1965) told a colleague that he has left the Donbas for good, returning home to Simferopol.

    2 replies 12 retweets 31 likes
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  10. Retweeted
    4 hours ago

    Ironmarch was just one of many online services/platforms these neo-Nazis used, they were also using Skype, many of them were also Facebook and Discord, at one point NA all moved onto Russian platform VK. This leak doesn't give a complete picture of their organising.

    2 replies 9 retweets 18 likes
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  11. Retweeted
    4 hours ago

    Some initial thoughts on the Ironmarch leak, after spending a couple of hours going through it this morning, mainly looking for National Action (NA) and UK-based users.

    A gigantic data leak from a white supremacist message board was posted onto the Internet Archive today. Here is our guide on how to find, access, and interpret this data, with some research leads at the bottom of the piece:
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    1 reply 29 retweets 34 likes
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  12. Retweeted
    24 hours ago

    This is curious in 2 ways: hardline Russian site News Front has a Georgian language version that claims that the Bellingcat article abt Azerbaijani deployments across Georgian border was a Western plot intended to pit Georgia against Azerbaijan

    1 reply 7 retweets 13 likes
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  13. Retweeted
    4 hours ago
    Replying to

    Some very crude visual representation :

    6 replies 10 retweets 24 likes
  14. Retweeted
    4 hours ago
    Replying to

    More

    1 reply 6 retweets 11 likes
  15. Retweeted
    5 hours ago
    Replying to

    Not really cool, nor of much use, but here a breakdown of users by country based on their IP addresses.

    4 replies 13 retweets 38 likes
  16. Retweeted
    6 hours ago

    Got some of our own Ukraine-US stuff coming soon on too, continuing this week's far right theme.

    3 replies 15 retweets 87 likes
  17. Retweeted
    22 hours ago
    Replying to

    We have indexed this leak here: Use the Tree View tab to navigate between the files.

    1 reply 20 retweets 65 likes
  18. 6 hours ago

    If you're doing some cool and interesting stuff with this leak be sure to let us know on Twitter so we can let everyone else know

    A gigantic data leak from a white supremacist message board was posted onto the Internet Archive today. Here is our guide on how to find, access, and interpret this data, with some research leads at the bottom of the piece:
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    8 replies 39 retweets 73 likes
  19. Retweeted
    6 hours ago

    Currently (with others) working on creating an accessible web page for the dataload (it's huge). Links already found to Richard Spencer, Turning Point USA, Gatestone Institute, and many others in the media.

    A gigantic data leak from a white supremacist message board was posted onto the Internet Archive today. Here is our guide on how to find, access, and interpret this data, with some research leads at the bottom of the piece:
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    5 replies 28 retweets 76 likes
  20. 6 hours ago

    Podcast with Bellingcat's Robert Evans, aka - 8chan, the Hate Site That’s Hard to Kill via

    9 retweets 19 likes
  21. Retweeted
    23 hours ago

    A gigantic data leak from a white supremacist message board was posted onto the Internet Archive today. Here is our guide on how to find, access, and interpret this data, with some research leads at the bottom of the piece:

    25 replies 773 retweets 1,068 likes
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  22. Retweeted
    9 hours ago

    Disturbing findings: a Quillette article, which had implied MSM is in league with antifa, seemingly became the basis for a far-right video calling for murders of journos named in the article. Easy for Quillette to distance itself, but that was ... not their response.

    Yesterday, in response to my interview of Andy Ngo, Claire Lehmann of Quillette publicly doubted the existence of a video death threat, based on research her site published. So I sent her a copy. Here was her…
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    2 replies 58 retweets 110 likes
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  23. Retweeted
    11 hours ago

    Perfect time to try the Vortimo beta, y’all:

    A gigantic data leak from a white supremacist message board was posted onto the Internet Archive today. Here is our guide on how to find, access, and interpret this data, with some research leads at the bottom of the piece:
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    7 retweets 17 likes
  24. Retweeted
    16 hours ago

    That Quillette article claimed journalists were associated with Antifa on the strength of their Twitter follows. I pointed out that I follow people like Richard Spencer as well as Antifascist accounts. I ask Claire if her far right follows mean she is sympathetic to them.

    30 replies 49 retweets 793 likes
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  25. Retweeted
    16 hours ago

    She furthermore denies that Andy leaving Quillette had anything to do with the video of him participating in an attack on Cider Riot.

    5 replies 38 retweets 729 likes
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  26. Retweeted
    16 hours ago

    Andy Ngo was an editor for Quillette at the time. She denies he edited videos deceptively while working for Quillette (there is evidence of this). She also stated that his work covering protests in Portland had nothing to do with his employment there.

    3 replies 43 retweets 744 likes
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  27. Retweeted
    16 hours ago

    She also denied Andy Ngo had any role in the editing or the production of that Quillette article. The article cite's and embeds one of Andy's tweets in the beginning. It cites him early on. It ends by noting he provided the picture for the article.

    1 reply 46 retweets 774 likes
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  28. Retweeted
    16 hours ago

    It ends on the voice of James Mason, a Neo-Nazi extremist who, again, explicitly urges assassination as a political tactic. "I do not urge anybody to do anything like that, but when it gets done, I won't disown them." Here was Claire's response.

    11 replies 55 retweets 843 likes
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  29. Retweeted
    16 hours ago

    The video then goes, slowly, through the names and faces of each targeted reporter. It ends on an image of an icon from the cover of the book Siege, which urges mass shootings and the murder of journalists.

    4 replies 47 retweets 656 likes
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  30. Retweeted
    16 hours ago

    After this, the video cuts from the curb stomping scene in American History X, to an antisemitic meme, to the collected twitter profiles of all the journalists named in the Quillette article. I will not share the full image of the kill list but here is how it is titled:

    4 replies 38 retweets 642 likes
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  31. Retweeted
    16 hours ago

    Next the video cuts from images of the Twitter pages for First Vigil and Unicorn Riot, both named in the Quillette article, to this picture of the Christchurch shooter making the "OK" sign. Some might view this as a threat.

    4 replies 39 retweets 645 likes
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  32. Retweeted
    16 hours ago

    For reference the video, which we both watched, opens with a photoshopped picture of Edward Norton, wearing a bowl cut. This is a reference to mass shooter Dylan Roof, and the "bowl patrol", a bunch of Nazis who idolize mass shooters.

    4 replies 50 retweets 729 likes
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  33. Retweeted
    16 hours ago

    Claire asked for evidence that this was tied to the false and defamatory article her site published. I pointed out that all the people featured in the threat video were listed in the article. Next she asked me what about the video was threatening.

    10 replies 64 retweets 816 likes
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  34. Retweeted
    16 hours ago

    Yesterday, in response to my interview of Andy Ngo, Claire Lehmann of Quillette publicly doubted the existence of a video death threat, based on research her site published. So I sent her a copy. Here was her response.

    45 replies 700 retweets 3,055 likes
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  35. 19 hours ago

    Early finding from the Iron March (neo-Nazi/white supremacist message board) leak. Our guide on navigating and analyzing the leaks:

    Well, that's awkward. Looks like Jacob Oakley, who recently tried (and failed) to run for Congress in Oklahoma, was a poster on the neo-Nazi forum.
    3 replies 34 retweets 81 likes
  36. 23 hours ago

    Iron March was not some milquetoast conservative or irony-laden alt-right forum. It was a forum that helped spawn violence, and hosted hardcore neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups and activists. Read more about them in this piece from :

    5 replies 71 retweets 115 likes
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  37. 23 hours ago

    At the bottom of our guide, we link to a spreadsheet we started with some potential leads of self-professed active serving U.S. military servicemen who were active in this group.

    3 replies 41 retweets 91 likes
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  38. 23 hours ago

    In our guide, we show you how to get this dataset (about a gigabyte, far less if you only get the CSV files and ignore the SQL database), and which files/columns are most important to use in your analysis. It's fairly simple, but takes some getting used to

    2 replies 31 retweets 65 likes
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  39. 23 hours ago

    The has done quite a bit of research on Iron March already -- check out this excellent article from earlier this year:

    1 reply 32 retweets 85 likes
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  40. 23 hours ago

    As Jake notes here, this giant data leak is from the Iron March forum, which was shut down in 2017 after being used to organize for the violent neo-Nazi group, Atomwaffen.

    Apparently the entire SQL database of the international neo-fascist Iron March forum (where Atomwaffen first properly organised). Contains info on all users, including user emails, IP address, and private messages, as…
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    1 reply 66 retweets 117 likes
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