ParentsPlea

The Database of the Dead — and Why the Powerful Fear It I want to tell you about the most important work I have ever done that almost nobody has heard of.

Not the books. Not the documentary. Not the petition to Spain or the years inside Amazon or the nonprofit I built and then had to shut down when I realized the problem was bigger than any nonprofit could fix. The most important work is a platform that most people in technology would dismiss in thirty seconds — because it does not scale in the way Silicon Valley means when it uses that word. It does not monetize. It does not grow through viral loops or network effects or paid acquisition funnels. It grows the way grief grows: one family at a time, one name at a time, one testimony added by someone who needed the world to know that the person they lost was a person.

ParentsPlea.com now holds over 140,000 profiles.

More than 107,000 of those profiles document deaths from war and armed conflict — from Gaza, from Lebanon, from Iran, from Yemen, from Afghanistan, from Syria, from countries whose names appear in the casualty statistics that scroll past our screens and disappear. The rest document deaths from police brutality, from corporate negligence, from social injustice — the categories of harm that produce statistics but rarely produce faces.

Every profile on ParentsPlea has a face. That is the point.

Why I Built It

In every chapter of this book, I have documented how the powerful erase the evidence of what their power produces. Meta deletes the posts. YouTube removes the videos. The DOJ redacts the documents. Company platforms comply with government takedown requests at rates that should make your stomach turn. The testimony disappears. The archive is gone. The record does not exist.

ParentsPlea exists to make that erasure impossible.

Not technologically impossible — I am not naïve enough to think any platform is beyond reach. But morally and legally impossible in a way that matters: because if 140,000 names are documented, sourced, linked to news coverage, and accompanied by family testimony, then the people ordering the erasure have to work harder. They have to file more takedown requests. They have to justify more removals. They have to explain, to more people, why they are trying to make a grieving mother's testimony disappear.

The evidentiary value of ParentsPlea goes beyond bearing witness. I built it with three specific legal purposes in mind.

First: if there is ever going to be judgment in a court of law — in Spain, at the ICC, in any jurisdiction with the courage to act — prosecutors need to be able to identify victims and attach human testimony to the machinery they are prosecuting. The targeting algorithms in Chapter Two are abstract until you put a name on the person they targeted. The kill lists are numbers

until you find the family of one of the 37,000 people Lavender flagged and let them speak. ParentsPlea is that bridge — from the documented crime to the documented victim.

Second: if reparations are ever ordered — and history suggests they eventually are, long after the people who should have paid them have died comfortable deaths — we need to know who was harmed and what they are owed. Reparations without a registry of the harmed are just a number with nowhere to go. ParentsPlea is building that registry.

Third: if there is ever going to be a memorial worthy of the name — not a wall of numbers, not a press release, not a moment of silence that lasts exactly long enough for the cameras to capture it — we need biographies. We need the complete record of who was lost, how they died, who is left behind, and what that family wants the world to know. ParentsPlea is building that record.

What the Platform Actually Does

Each profile on ParentsPlea is built from fields that serve evidentiary as much as memorial purposes. A photograph, where available. A biography — not a summary, but the kind of life information that makes a person real to a stranger: age, gender, religion, marital status, children, occupation, the things they loved. Cause of death. The alleged responsible party — named, not hidden behind bureaucratic language. Location of death. Links to news articles that corroborate the account. And the family's plea — their words, in their own language, addressed to whoever is still willing to listen.

The platform is built on a combination of user submissions and curated staff research. My team — small, underfunded, working across time zones from offices that are themselves in the regions being documented — actively searches news sources, published articles, and publicly available reporting to build and verify profiles. We have also developed tools to index and crawl the web for relevant information. We have connections to communities in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and elsewhere. They do not have the resources of a newsroom. They have something more valuable: the trust of the families they are documenting and the tenacity to find the record when no one else is keeping it.

We also accept direct submissions from families and witnesses. When a profile is submitted, it goes through a verification process against publicly available sources before it is published. This is not a database I built about the dead. It is a database built by a dedicated team — and by the living — to honor the dead and document the crimes that killed them.

Why the Powerful Fear a Registry

There is a question I asked earlier in this book that I want to return to here with more force: why do we track sex offenders but not the Epstein class?

Sex offender registries exist because society decided that the crimes committed by a certain category of predator were too serious to leave undocumented. The public has a right to know where these people live. The victims have a right to see their abuser's name on a list. The registry is a form of accountability that does not require a prison sentence to function — it functions as permanent social and legal documentation of what someone did.

Now ask yourself: why do the executives of Palantir, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle — whose tools have been documented as central infrastructure for the killing of tens of thousands of civilians — face no equivalent documentation? Why are the names of the people

who authorized Project Nimbus and the Gospel targeting system and the Lavender kill list not on a searchable public registry? Why are the redacted DOJ documents that protect the powerful men who attended Jeffrey Epstein's events still redacted, years after his death, while the names of low-level drug offenders are searchable in public court records?

The answer is power. The registry exists for the powerless because the powerful built it. The powerful have no equivalent registry because the powerful have no interest in building one.

ParentsPlea is, among other things, the beginning of a different registry. Not of individuals convicted in court — we are not a court. But of the corporate actors, the government actors, and the institutional actors alleged to be responsible for the deaths documented in our profiles. Every profile names its alleged responsible party. Those names accumulate. That accumulation is a form of public documentation that no settlement agreement with a nondisclosure clause can reach.

Jeffrey Epstein did not operate alone. The men whose names appear in the documents the DOJ has kept sealed for years have resources, lawyers, and political connections that have kept them invisible. The families of the children they harmed do not have those resources. What they have is testimony — and testimony, when it is documented and preserved and placed in a public archive with 140,000 other testimonies, becomes something harder to dismiss than a single complaint in a court that can be delayed, appealed, and buried for decades.

I want to do God's big data work in this world — cataloguing the devils' deeds so that justice, which the courts and governments have failed to deliver on schedule, can at least be demanded with evidence. Call it divine due diligence, delivered with open-source tools and the stubborn refusal to forget. The ones who commit crimes against children, against women and men, against the most vulnerable members of our society deserve to be on a list. Not hidden behind a redacted DOJ file. Visible. Named. Documented. Tracked.

We track sex offenders because society decided their crimes were too serious to leave undocumented. The crimes of the Epstein class — against children, against the rule of law, against the basic dignity of human beings who had no power to fight back — are no less serious. They are more serious, because the power that enables those crimes is also the power that prevents their prosecution.

ParentsPlea.com is building toward that accounting. One profile at a time. One family testimony at a time. One verified news source at a time. My work is not complete. It is a beginning.

How to Use It

If you have lost someone — to war, to corporate negligence, to police brutality, to any of the forces described in this book — go to ParentsPlea.com and submit their story. The form asks for the information listed above. You do not need a lawyer to submit. You do not need to prove anything beyond what you know and what can be linked to publicly available sources. Your testimony is evidence. Your family's story belongs in the archive.

If you are a human rights lawyer, a journalist, a researcher, or an advocate — the archive is searchable. The profiles are documented. The alleged responsible parties are named. Use it. That is what it is for.

If you are one of the executives named in this book: your name is in here too. Not as a profile of the dead, but as an alleged responsible party attached to the profiles of those whose deaths your tools are documented to have enabled. You should know that. The archive grows every day.

There is a name I need to say here that belongs in any honest accounting of what ParentsPlea.com is for. Refaat Alareer was a Palestinian poet and professor who lived in Gaza. He taught literature at the Islamic University of Gaza and edited a collection of short stories called Gaza Writes Back. He wrote one of the most widely shared poems of this entire era of conflict — a poem he titled "If I Must Die." He wrote it in the full knowledge of what he was living through. He wrote it as a man who understood that he might not survive what was coming. If I must die, you must live to tell my story to sell my things to buy a piece of cloth and some strings make it white with a long tail so a child somewhere in Gaza while looking heaven in the eye awaiting his dad who left in a blaze and bid no one farewell, not even to his flesh, not even to himself sees the kite, my kite you made,flying up above and thinks for a momentan angel is therebringing back love. If I must die let it bring hope, let it be a tale. In December 2023, Refaat Alareer was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza. He was forty-four years old. He was a teacher, a writer, a father. He had written a poem about his own death so that the people who came after him would know what to do with it. He told them to keep living. To tell the story. To make a kite. His profile is on ParentsPlea.com. He is not there because we sat in the same room with him — we did not. He is there because people like him, who documented what these weapons do to a people, are being killed before they can keep documenting it. Someone has to keep the record when the witnesses are gone. That is what ParentsPlea is. That is what it has always been. Not a media organization. Not an NGO with institutional funding. A record. Because just peace requires us to inspect the deaths that have taken place — who is doing the killing, who is suffering the amputations and the horrors of these wars that we are witnessing. And because Refaat Alareer told us what to do if he must die. He must die for us to keep living. For us to tell his story. We are telling it. I want to be specific about what methodology we use, because the critics who have not built what we have built will question it. The profiles on ParentsPlea.com are built from open-source published reporting — the work of journalists, human rights organizations, and official governmental and institutional sources. We verify each profile against a published source before it is added to the archive. We link directly to those sources. We name the alleged responsible party. We preserve the family testimony where it exists. We play the national anthem of the country where each person lived and died — a small act of dignity that costs nothing but means something. The journalists whose reporting underlies many of our Gaza and Lebanon profiles are themselves, in many cases, no longer alive. They were targeted. Amal Khalil (ParentsPlea.com/amal-khalil), Ghada Dayekh (ParentsPlea.com/ghada-dayekh), and Suzan Khalil (ParentsPlea.com/suzan-khalil) are among the Lebanese journalists whose deaths we have documented — journalists allegedly killed by Israeli military action while doing exactly what journalists exist to do: bearing witness in conflict zones. Their deaths are an attack not only on them but on the record itself — on the evidence that site like ParentsPlea exist to preserve. We also document deaths that fall outside the most-covered conflicts. Alejandro Carranza Medina was a Colombian fisherman, not a journalist, not a combatant, not a person whose name would appear in a Senate report. He was forty years old. He went to sea from Santa Marta and did not return because a U.S. military airstrike in the

Caribbean hit the vessel he was aboard — a vessel the Colombian government later stated had suffered mechanical failure and was stranded at sea, not engaged in drug trafficking. His wife, Katerine Hernández, filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights accusing the U.S. government of murder and extrajudicial killing. She asked: "Why did they take his life like that? Fishermen have the right to live. Why didn't they just detain them?" (Source: ParentsPlea.com/alejandro-carranza) Her question is on ParentsPlea. His photograph is on ParentsPlea. His biography, his religion, his marital status, his cause of death, and the name of the government alleged to be responsible — all of it is there, with sources, free to access, free to cite, free to use in any legal or journalistic proceeding that needs it. No advertising. No fees. No corporate sponsors. This is the database the powerful fear. Not because it is large — it is, by the scale of the atrocities it documents, still tragically small. But because it refuses to let the algorithm erase what the weapon produced. Because it keeps asking, in the voice of every family who trusted it: why? That question has no expiration date. Neither does the record. ---ParentsPlea.com documents what has already happened. ConflictTour is an attempt to change what happens next — before the next generation of young people is handed a recruitment brochure designed by an algorithm that has been gaming their social feeds since they were twelve. Chapter Seventeen is the affirmative argument: not just against the war machine, but for the alternative. Witness. Service. A different kind of courage than the kind the Twitch stream is selling.