2024 in Review

When I wrote last year’s review, I was at a pretty low point. We’d just gotten amicus support from the Georgia First Amendment Foundation, but we were still a few months away from finding out certiorari had been granted. If we’d have been denied, I would have been on the hook, for at least $53,000 and likely for over $100,000 of the other side’s attorney fees in addition to my own - and I have never been able to understand how our Open Records case in Georgia went sideways. It should have been a straightforward deal. I’d figured it out in a pro se capacity before I ever submitted the request.

But certiorari was granted, and we proceeded to the Georgia Supreme Court and won a unanimous opinion in August. At the time of this writing, we are still waiting to be remanded from the Appeals court back to the trial court to commence discovery.

For a few years, our focus has been quite narrow on cyber researchers connected to the Alfa Bank allegations. We still have open federal FOIA cases, including the case that delivered us the Dagon/Antonakakis attribution report.

In March they gave us a version that was 100% redacted. I protested, only to receive a second iteration that was also 100% redacted.

I’m still fighting the exemptions and I believe we will get an unredacted copy, but it may take a few more months.

We kicked off February with a fun interview of fool_nelson, one of the good friends I have made over the last several years and a brilliant sleuth who contributed heavily to ID’ing Igor Danchenko, along with ID’ing David Dagon and Rodney Joffe before the Sussmann indictment - all on the back of being the first to identify Eric Ciaramella.

We rounded out February by asking Rodney Joffe some questions, and raising more questions about the Netyksho indictment.

We got certiorari in mid-March, followed by getting a key MoU between DARPA and the DOJ.

We talked a little about Tejas Patel in May, and then posted a slew of our FOIA documents, which I have done a terrible job of organizing and delivering to you. I am working on a solution, but none is imminent. I’m certain I haven’t shared everything I have and/or have never done a post where I shared them all together in a clean and accessible way.

To start off June I shared more documents obtained from the DOD, then shared documents showing DARPA’s Angelos Keromytis was detailed to the FBI. We speculate similar documents exist for Tejas Patel. In mid-June we had oral arguments before the Georgia Supreme Court and I felt pretty good we’d won our case.

In August we found out we’d won. We also obtained more documents from the DOD which led to our story on Racket News.

In November we talked about Stuart Bruseth and documents that raise previously unasked questions.

So here we are.

Now why was there a month delay between getting the attribution report and our article yesterday? I got in contact with a number of experts in the field and developed some new contacts. That type of review can take some time.

I also found out some things that I am working to develop in the coming months. It’s a different angle to the Russiagate story that apparently nobody knows but us.

We also launched a new fight for documents that I am going to keep secret for a couple more weeks. I know I’m going to get some documents, I’m on the right side of the law…but we’re going to under promise and over deliver on this one. With our luck we might have to go back to a state Supreme Court again.

I hope everyone has a great holiday season, we have some interesting weeks and months ahead.