Last month, I got an email from Briana Blackwell from No Starch Press's marketing department, telling me that Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations: The Art of Analyzing Hacked and Leaked Data by Micah Lee was available in early access, and that they'd be happy to send me an ebook copy free of charge!
From the couple of interactions I had with him, Lee is not only a great human being, but also technically literate. He's the director of information security at The Intercept, and the person behind OnionShare and DangerZone; so I was thrilled to finally get my hands on his book!
And what a great one it is! It's a complete course for everyone who want to learn how to properly deal with and report on large data sets like leaks: How to communicate with sources along with some notions of opsec, some words on the ethics of dealing with this kind of data, how to get data leaks and how to analyse them properly and safely, wrangling tools like dangerzone, a BitTorrent client, Signal, Tor via the Tor Browser and Onionshare, some linux and shell basics, a crash course into data analysis with Python and SQL, the OCCRP's Aleph, … with hands-on exercises and reporting examples based on real leaks like EpikFail, BlueLeaks, the Oath Keepers leak, Unicorn Riot's DiscordLeaks, AFLDS, he Heritage Foundation emails, …
It's a comprehensive yet highly digestible resource that I would wholeheartedly recommend to anyone remotely interested by modern journalism practises. Hacked and dumped databases are all around the internet, waiting to be analysed, reported on, contextualised and exposed, and with this book, anyone could help with the effort of making the world a better place: sunlight is the best disinfectant!