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   IMAGE: SAUL LOEB/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES   
      
   The Hacker Who Archived Parler Explains How She Did It (and What Comes Next)   
   The hacker, donk_enby, explained that she only scraped what was publicly   
   available: "I hope that it can be used to hold people accountable and to   
   prevent more death."   
   LN   
   By Leland Nally   
   January 12, 2021, 12:53pm   
      
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   With Twitter's permanent ban of Donald Trump and tens of thousands of   
   QAnon-linked accounts following the Capitol takeover on Wednesday, many   
   of Trump’s followers planned to make a new home on Parler, the “free   
   speech” alternative that has become known for hosting far-right content.   
      
   Those plans hit a snag when Amazon Web Services, Google, and Apple   
   deplatformed Parler, effectively erasing it off the internet, at least   
   temporarily. Parler was an organizing and rallying point for the   
   far-right, including many of the Capitol Hill insurrectionists, and so   
   its erasure from the internet threatened to destroy months of posts that   
   could be used to better understand the attack on the Capitol.   
      
   But the quick thinking of a self-described hacker by the name of   
   donk_enby and a host of amateur data hoarders preserved more than 56.7   
   terabytes of data from Parler that donk_enby and open source   
   investigators believe could be useful in piecing together what happened   
   last Wednesday and in the weeks and months leading up to it. donk_enby   
   was able to scrape and capture and archive nearly the entire content of   
   the website after it became clear that hundreds of Trump supporters had   
   uploaded potentially incriminating photos and videos of themselves to   
   the platform, many filming from inside the Capitol itself.   
      
   When news of donk_enby's archival efforts broke, several viral tweets,   
   Reddit posts, and Facebook posts claimed that she had captured private   
   information, scans of drivers licenses and IDs, and other highly   
   sensitive information. She said those posts are “not at all” accurate.   
      
   “Everything we grabbed was publicly available on the web, we just made a   
   permanent public snapshot of it,” donk_enby told me.   
      
   Nevertheless, with the FBI, state and local law enforcement, and   
   open-source investigators looking for media from Wednesday's attack, the   
   archive could be highly useful to a whole host of people.   
      
   “I hope that it can be used to hold people accountable and to prevent   
   more death,” she said. “I think people should be allowed to have their   
   own opinion as long as they can act civilized, on Wednesday we saw what   
   can happen if they don’t.”   
      
   On Saturday, Amazon Web Services announced that it would no longer host   
   Parler, cutting the company off from one of the largest web hosts in the   
   world. The move was set to be effective Sunday at midnight. The clock   
   was ticking.   
      
   When rumors of Parler’s imminent deletion began to circulate, donk_enby,   
   who has been researching Parler for months, understood that a litany of   
   important information about America’s most prominent far-right extremist   
   groups was at risk of being permanently hidden from the public eye. In a   
   monumental effort, donk_enby and a few other fellow hackers and   
   researchers managed to capture and archive nearly every post, photo and   
   video on Parler before it was shut down.   
      
   “Last night was all gas no brakes,” she told me Monday.   
      
   When word of donk_enby’s project broke online, competing theories   
   circled about what information had actually been pulled. What donk_enby   
   actually did was an old school scrape of already publicly available   
   information. Using a jailbroken iPad and Ghidra, a piece of   
   reverse-engineering software designed and publicly released by the   
   National Security Agency, donk_enby managed to exploit weaknesses in the   
   website’s design to pull the URL’s of every single public post on Parler   
   in sequential order, from the very first to the very last, allowing her   
   to then capture and archive the contents.   
      
   The task of downloading that data, what she called the “big pull”, was a   
   race against the clock—Amazon was set to revoke Parler’s hosting   
   services within hours, and over 50 terrabytes of data had to be pulled   
   from the site in order to be effectively archived. After donk_enby   
   tweeted about the content she was scraping from Parler, the Archive   
   Team, a volunteer collection of hackers and data researchers who have   
   saved a host of other dying sites, took notice and joined in her effort.   
   “The Archive Team deserves a lot of credit for orchestrating the big   
   pull,” donky_enby told me, saying that he group paid the steep server   
   costs and constructed a tool that allowed anonymous Twitter users to   
   volunteer their own bandwidth to help speed the transfer, which at one   
   point peaked at 50 GB per second. The extra speed proved critical—the   
   group-effort managed to capture 96% of Parler’s content by midnight.   
      
   In December, donk_enby published details about Parler's iOS app on her   
   GitHub, which Archive Team used to help them scrape the site. At the   
   time, she posted on her GitHub that the API could be used "to solve fun   
   mysteries such as:   
      
   Is my dad on Parler?   
   Who was on Parler before it first started gaining popularity when   
   Candice Owens tweeted about in December 2018?   
   Is Parler really the world's most secure social network? (no)"   
   donk_enby had originally intended to grab data only from the day of the   
   Capitol takeover, but found that the poor construction and security of   
   Parler allowed her to capture, essentially, the entire website. That   
   ended up being 56.7 terabytes of data, which included every public post   
   on Parler, 412 million files in all—including 150 million photos and   
   more than 1 million videos. Each of these had embedded metadata like   
   date, time and GPS coordinates—unlike most social media sites, Parler   
   does not strip metadata from media its users upload, which, crucially,   
   could be useful for law enforcement and open source investigators.   
      
   The data is currently being processed and should be available to browse   
   in a couple days, according to donk_enby. Early archives of it are   
   already cropping up as torrent files and are being shared on IRC   
   channels and different git sites. One of the hosters posted this message   
   on their website: "the files were shared from this site, and made into a   
   torrent file so the distribution is mostly out of my hands now," they   
      
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