WLDragnet is an exclusive investigative series by Talk Liberation Investigates. WLDragnet revealed widespread monitoring of the social media accounts of activists, journalists, influencers and everyday citizens who are in support of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

WLDragnet Report Search is a tool that allows users to enter a Twitter handle and then download a custom PDF report containing any mentions of that handle in the data sources from the WLDragnet reporting.

The original source of the files is NodeXL - a social media analysis tool maintained by the non-profit Social Media Research Foundation and utilized by a for-profit consulting company called Connected Action. These organizations regularly use NodeXL to run reputation management reports for a slew of beltway corporations including many US military contractors and weapons manufacturers, as well as the US State Department and NATO.

The source files span December 2018 to the present day and were first published by Talk Liberation in October 2021 in a public file repository which is located here.

Though all documents that support our research are publicly-available, their compilation, annotation, and analysis comprises an original and noteworthy contribution to public understanding of mass surveillance.

The documents relate to monitoring, tracking, and reporting measures described by NodeXL principals as intended to enable "detection, deflection, and deterrance" of targeted account holders. Such ideological weaponizing of social media presents a threat to democratically-protected speech and actions of a wide variety of people, particularly those identified via their user handle(s) in the NodeXL files, with the obvious capacity to result in real world harm.

We seek to mitigate that real world harm by empowering the public to discover whether they have been unwittingly pulled into the dragnet.

Talk Liberation's WLDragnet reporting makes clear that journalists, activists, and many others have been targeted for their advocacy and speech. It is important to consider the results in context to determine why a specific user handle is mentioned. A major goal of the WLDragnet Search tool is to make this process as convenient as possible. This is why, for example, we provide a short description, keywords, and hashtags alongside lists of Twitter handles and links to the archived sources.

A major criticism of social network analysis via NodeXL is that graphs pull in user handles divorced from appropriate context. This means that even DoD and CIA contractors end up in the dataset. Other examples include reports run by the creators of NodeXL for NATO meetings that include official government handles.

The WLDragnet Investigates series is authored by Sean O'Brien (Chief Security Officer, Panquake; Founder of Yale University Privacy Lab and Lecturer at Yale Law School) and Suzie Dawson (Founder and Chief Product Officer, Panquake). The WLDragnet Report Search app is brought to you by the development team building Panquake, and is administered by Talk Liberation ehf. in Iceland using sustainable geothermal and hydroelectric energy.

WLDragnet files were obtained via open-source intelligence (OSINT) of graphs available in the public arena, and none of the published information was obtained via leaks, hacking, or data breaches.

The creators of NodeXL have reacted to the WLDragnet revelations by tracking Talk Liberation alongside themselves in NodeXL reports. Their attempts at reputation management by studying the spread of WLDragnet means they are now included within the WLDragnet dataset itself.