This video presents a talk by Yaroslav, a Ukrainian developer, about a database of leaked personal data of Russian citizens he has been developing and maintaining. The project's goal is to provide data to journalists, military personnel, and law enforcement for investigating crimes in the context of the ongoing war.
Yaroslav outlines the technical aspects of the database, which uses the "Follow the Money" ontology for data structuring, a custom processing pipeline, ZFS for efficient storage, and a full-text search engine. He clarifies that data is sourced from public leaks and hacker groups but is never purchased. The speaker directly confronts the legal and ethical dimensions of his work, acknowledging it is likely illegal and "super unethical" to handle such sensitive data, which includes medical records. He justifies the project by stating that in the current wartime situation, any benefit derived from the database outweighs the inherent harm to individual privacy. During the Q&A, he reinforces this stance, stating that concerns like long-term security and data deletion requests are secondary to the project's immediate utility and will be addressed only after the war.
A Presentation on a Leaked Russian Data Database
0:00:45 Introduction to the Project: Yaroslav introduces his work: developing and maintaining a database of leaked personal data of Russians. This data is used by journalists, military, and law enforcement to investigate crimes.
0:02:48 Data Sourcing Principles: Data is collected from public sources like hacker group publications and Telegram channels. Yaroslav emphasizes that they never buy data.
0:03:30 Data Structuring: The project uses the "Follow the Money" ontology, a framework that allows for storing detailed metadata for each record, including its origin.
0:04:51 Technical Infrastructure: A custom processing pipeline is used to ingest data. The entire infrastructure runs on a single server, utilizing ZFS for disk compression and to speed up database queries.
0:07:04 Search Functionality: The database employs a full-text search engine (transcribed as "MANC search") to allow users to efficiently search through the vast amounts of data.
0:08:12 Legal Warning: The speaker acknowledges that creating and maintaining such a database is considered illegal in Ukraine and most other jurisdictions, and he strongly advises the audience not to undertake similar activities.
0:08:55 Ethical Justification: Yaroslav describes the project as "super unethical," as it contains sensitive data on both military personnel and ordinary civilians, including medical test results. However, he justifies it given the context of the war.
0:10:35 Access for Professionals: Journalists and law enforcement representatives are invited to contact him via email if they need access to the database.
0:11:48 Q&A on Harm vs. Benefit: When questioned about the ethical balance, Yaroslav states his position is that if the project provides any benefit greater than zero, it outweighs all the harm caused to the individuals in the database.
0:13:23 Q&A on Security: In response to a question about technical security and backups, he replies that these issues are not a current priority and will be dealt with after the war ends.
0:15:04 Q&A on Deletion Requests: Yaroslav confirms they have never received a request for data to be deleted and states that any such requests would be ignored.