The attack on democracy by insurrectionists last week was planned on social media platform Parler, which is was the Facebook for Criminals before Amazon yanked it off its servers for violating community standards.  Apparently, Amazon takes a dim view of threatening mass murder and overthrow of governments, and now that Parler is offline, extremists are being forced back into the dark web, the cozy home for racists and child pornographers.

All that is good, but here’s what’s really good…before Parler was taken offline, hackers (who the press calls researchers) scraped personal data on approximately 12 million users, a lot of whom are white supremacists, anti-government types, Trumpists, and armed insurgents.  What’s REALLY good?  After promising anonymity and more “freedom”, Parler actually was more intrusive than even Facebook.  Like Facebook, Parler followed people around, but even required users to upload their DRIVER’S LICENSE to become a “verified person”.  Also all videos posted to the site captured actual GPS coordinates for the video.  The result?  Thousands of the rioters who carried their phones (all of them) incriminated themselves as Parler captured who they were, where they were, and what they did.  Apparently the hackers captured up to 70 terabytes (that’s a lot) of data including said driver’s licenses, geolocations, deleted messages, and something like 1.1 million videos that included GPS locations.

The FBI has a LOT of doors to knock on now, and that’s a good thing.