A new tool searches your LinkedIn connections for people who are mentioned in the Epstein files, just in case you don’t, understandably, want anything to do with them on the already deranged social network.
404 Media tested the tool, called EpsteIn—as in, a mash up of Epstein and LinkedIn—and it appears to work.
“I found myself wondering whether anyone had mapped Epstein's network in the style of LinkedIn—how many people are 1st/2nd/3rd degree connections of Jeffrey Epstein?” Christopher Finke, the creator of the tool, told 404 Media in an email. “Smarter programmers than me have already built tools to visualize that, but I couldn't find anything that would show the overlap between my network and his.”
“Thankfully the overlap is zero, but I did find that a previous co-worker who I purposefully chose not to keep in touch with appears in the files, and not in an incidental way. Trusting my gut on him paid off, I suppose,” he added.
Finke said the tool is based on the work of Patrick Duggan, who made an API to easily search the files.
“Search the publicly released Epstein court documents for mentions of your LinkedIn connections,” the GitHub repository for the tool reads.
The tool can output a report that shows each result’s name, company, and their position; the total number of mentions across all the searched documents; excerpts from each matching document, and links to the original material on the Department of Justice’s website.
In my case, the tool found 22 connections with mentions in the Epstein files. But, many of these are likely false positives. Some of them were very common names. The tool also found 5 hits for “Adam S.” Obviously, there could be a lot of people with that name and initial. The repository acknowledges this: “Common names may produce false positives—review the context excerpts to verify relevance.”
Last week the DOJ published 3.5 million pages of files related to the investigations of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The massive dump also contained videos, images, and audio recordings. 404 Media found it included multiple unredacted photos of fully nude women or girls, with the DOJ only taking them down days after their upload. We also covered Musk’s inclusion in the files.
The dump contains a wealth of other tech elites, WIRED reported. Peter Thiel, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and many others all make an appearance.
But a mention does not necessarily mean those people were up to anything nefarious (although many, many were, obviously). Jeff Moss, the founder of the DEF CON hacking conference, is mentioned in the files because Vincenzo Iozzo, a well-known hacker, offered to introduce Epstein to the DEF CON founder.
On Reddit, Moss wrote, “Vincenzo approached me for free badges and I said no, and pointed him to the Epstein Wikipedia page and tried to warn him to stay away from any involvement. I didn’t realize how deep it went. As far as I know Epstein never attended. All this other behind the scenes stuff is wild, but not surprising.”
Moss’s LinkedIn post is also where 404 Media first saw the EpsteIN tool.
Update: this piece has been updated to include information from the tool's creator.
