{"$schema":"https://ejfox.com/schema/page-twin@1.json","kind":"project","url":"https://ejfox.com/projects/paramilitary-leaks","json_url":"https://ejfox.com/projects/paramilitary-leaks.json","generator":"ejfox.com/json-twin@1","data":{"cacheVersion":"2026-05-13-gear-cards","html":"

I was perusing Mastodon, as one does, and noticed a post from journalist Micah Lee saying he was exploring a 200GB dump from American paramilitary groups — a leak made possible through the incredible bravery of John Williams, who infiltrated these groups and exfiltrated the data. I hadn't heard of the dump before, and immediately sent Micah an email offering to help with any dataviz.

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The leak explorer — search + a dense visual index of the document set
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The pipeline chops and screws the data from Telegram HTML exports into SQLite, then Parquet hosted on Cloudflare R2 — a columnar format that's super-fast in the browser. On top of that sits a Nuxt + regl-scatterplot frontend with full-text search, filters, and a dense visual index of the corpus. We took a 200GB leak and turned it into something a reporter can explore in the browser.

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Full-text search across the corpus
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Explore it at para-leaks.ejfox.com, read the full write-up — Processing Telegram Leaks for Fast Web Visualization — or watch the walkthrough: Visualizing 200GB Of Leaked Telegram Chats.

","title":"Paramilitary Leaks","metadata":{"title":"Paramilitary Leaks","date":"2025-09-01T04:00:00.000Z","category":"Journalism","featured":true,"tech":["Nuxt","Vue","Search","Data Visualization"],"state":"deployed","ai-involvement":"ai-assisted","context":"collaborative","tags":["journalism","data","osint","tools"],"words":180,"images":2,"imageDetails":{"total":2,"cloudinary":2,"withDimensions":0},"links":8,"codeBlocks":0,"headers":{},"toc":[],"type":"post"}},"_links":{"self":"https://ejfox.com/projects/paramilitary-leaks.json","html":"https://ejfox.com/projects/paramilitary-leaks","index":"/projects.json"}}