A developer calling themselves Patr10tic has taken archived versions of videos uploaded by Parler users during the deadly Capitol Hill siege, geolocated them, reuploaded them, and placed them on an interactive map for anybody to watch.
The beta project nicknamed “Y’all Qaeda” is one of the first to present posts and videos from the archived Parler data that was saved by a hacker and a team of archivists. So far, most reporting and projects have relied on metadata alone.
Videos by VICE
The website is also the first to make actual videos from last week’s attack on the Capitol easily accessible to the public.
“About half of the metadata I have I got from the source before the leak occurred,” Patr10tic told Motherboard. “I found a way to download just the first several kilobytes of each file, and use exiftool to parse the GPS coordinates. I got about half a million headers that way (from donks url list), but abandoned that effort after she just released the whole metadata collection herself. Exiftool is hella slow!”
Some of the early videos plotted by Patr10tic show rioters shouting “WHOSE HOUSE? OUR HOUSE” within the halls of the Capitol. Another shows a speaker at a stage with a giant poster that says “Q Moms For America.” Another shows “Qanon Shaman” Jake Angeli shouting “FREEDOM” on the steps outside the Capitol. The videos are yet more evidence that many Parler users were indeed on Capitol Hill during the riots. The Parler videos could prove useful for law enforcement and activists who are trying to identify who participated in the riots.
“I didn’t need terabytes and terabytes of videos, just the ones on the capitol grounds, so I sorted through the gps coordinates based on proximity, and obtained the video IDs for just those files,” Patr10tic said. “Then I downloaded them from a mirror that someone else is hosting.”
So far, Patr10tic has uploaded close to fifty videos onto the Capitol Hill map, all geolocated to where they originated from last Wednesday. They said that they have had to manually upload all of the videos to YouTube but had recently found an automated way to do so, so more videos are incoming: “fortunately I just found an automated replacement, so I should be able to get the rest up tonight when I can deploy that solution.”
“The real danger is youtube killing the channel, then it’ll all be for nothing. If that happens I’ll have to find some other way, so at least law enforcement has the tool,” they added.
