Memetic Warfare Weekly: Telemetryapp.io Special Edition
Friends, readers, countrymemes, today is the day.
I’m ecstatic to announce the public launch of Telemetry’s open beta, a Telegram advanced search engine for data scraped from public groups and channels.
We will be returning to our regularly scheduled programming as of next week, which will cover a Russia-oriented investigation use case featuring Telegram.
I would be forever grateful for readers of this blog to try out Telemetry and let me know what they think - either by reaching out on the site, to me directly at ari@glowstickintel.com or via LinkedIn.
I’ve spoken about the importance of Telegram in this humble Substack on many an occasion, and for good reason as it’s a key platform for IO, CTI, extremism research and frankly any other forms of open-source investigation.
Data leaks, influence operations, cyber operations, terrorist and extremist organizations and other online harms propagate on Telegram. These harms exploit Telegram’s semi-opaque nature, as there’s no true fully-featured search feature for Telegram being a very limited “global” search for channels, groups and users.
This problem is what Telemetry aspires to solve by providing a powerful search engine for open, public and ethically sourced data from Telegram to empower journalists, analysts, investigators and others to quickly, easily and effectively identify relevant content online.
Beyond that, I firmly believe that it (and messaging applications in general) is in many ways the future of the internet. Telegram, alongside other smaller messaging applications, provides a window into the “rest” of the world, so to speak, that other platforms don’t provide and are less covered by mainstream media.
This access is crucial for not only OSINT analysts, but also journalists, marketing and PR teams, brand protection, information security teams, financial analysts and many others to help better understand the online environment, and add perhaps the single most important new online platform to their toolkit of accessible data.
Telemetry is currently in its open beta stage and will be so for at least the coming month, if not longer. Despite being in open beta, there are some still advanced features available:
Boolean logic and Google operator support for queries - see below image:
Advanced Channel Search - see below image:
Export to CSV
And many more coming!
This is a big day for me and my partners, as we’ve been working on this for quite a while.
Check it out and let me know what you think!