Hi, I'm Micah. I help journalists, researchers, and activists stay safe and productive.
Visit micahflee.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Feb 2019 – Oct 2026
Security & Privacy 11Society, Policy & Culture 3Open Source 3Tech Industry & Business 3AI & Machine Learning 2
💡Update May 3, 2025: I have posted a follow-up, Here's the source code for the unofficial Signal app used by Trump officials. Update May 4, 2025: Another followup, and a big one: The Signal Clone the Trump Admin Uses Was Hacked Update May 6, 2025: I've written
💡Update May 21, 2025: I've written a new detailed analysis of the heap dump dataset itself: TeleMessage customers include DC Police, Andreessen Horowitz, JP Morgan, and hundreds more Update May 26, 2025: I've published the source code for TeleMessage Explorer: a new open source research tool This morning,
I’m excited to announce that OnionShare 2.2 is released! You can download it from onionshare.org. When I first wrote OnionShare in 2014, it let you anonymously and securely send files to people. It worked like this: OnionShare zips up the files, starts a local web server on
💡Update May 18, 2025: I described TeleMessage's trivial vulnerability in an article for WIRED: How the knock-off Signal app used by Trump officials got hacked in 20 minutes Update May 19, 2025: Uh oh: DDoSecrets publishes 410 GB of heap dumps, hacked from TeleMessage's archive server Update
After nearly a year of work from a growing community of developers, designers, and translators, I'm excited that OnionShare 2 is finally ready. You can download it from onionshare.org. OnionShare is an open source tool for securely and anonymously sending and receiving files using Tor onion services. It
In January, Distributed Denial of Secrets published over 200 gigabytes of chat logs and recordings from paramilitary groups and militias, including American Patriots Three Percent (APIIII) and the Oath Keepers. The files were obtained by John Williams, a wilderness survival trainer who spent years deep undercover…
This weekend I went to BSides SF 2023 and had a blast. I went to some really interesting talks (including an excellent one about adversarial machine learning), but mostly I spent my time solving CTF hacking challenges. And this time, I did it with the help of GPT-4, the
💡Update May 26, 2025: I've published the source code for TeleMessage Explorer: a new open source research tool I've been digging through the 410 GB of Java heap dumps from TeleMessage's archive server, provided by DDoSecrets. Here's a description of the dataset, some of my initial
I recently read End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. It's an excellent book and I highly recommend that everyone read it. Tech oligarchs make up an important component of the end-times-fascist coalition. One thing that stood out
Last week, I wrote about how Joshua Aaron's ICEBlock app, which allows people to anonymously report ICE sightings within a 5-mile radius, is – unfortunately, and despite apparent good intentions – activism theater. This was based on Joshua's talk at HOPE where he made it clear that he isn'
At this summer's HOPE conference, Joshua Aaron spoke about ICEBlock, his iPhone app that allows users to anonymously report ICE sightings within a 5 mile radius, and to get notifications when others report ICE sightings near them. You can see the full talk, and the lively/infuriating Q&A,
I've spent the last week or two writing code to make sense of the massive hack of data from TeleMessage, the comically insecure company that makes a modified Signal app that Trump's former national security advisor Mike Waltz was caught using. I've decided to publish my code