Archiving Parler

This is awesome!:

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.”