AMA: We are Distributed Denial of Secrets. We published Blue Leaks, 269 gigabytes of data from police intelligence centres. First our website was banned by Twitter, then our data server in Germany was seized. Ask Us Anything!

Hello Reddit!

We are Lorax Horne u/netlorax and Emma Best u/natsecgeek, here to answer your questions about Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), a publishing group of which we are both members. On June 19, we published 269 gigabytes of data gathered from over 200 police departments from the United States released by Anonymous as Blue Leaks. A few days later, Twitter suspended our Twitter account. On July 2, German authorities seized our public data server, an escalation that Emma tweeted as soon as we knew.

Blue Leaks contains evidence of law enforcement tracking recent protests against police brutality and Black Lives Matters, keeping databases of ethnic groups like Roma people, and spreading right-wing propaganda as if it were intelligence via these fusion centers. Other research has uncovered a Panama crypto currency laundromat and U.S. law enforcement monitoring Canadian climate and indigenous activism.

From Wired:

“For roughly the past year and a half, a small group of activists known as DDoSecrets, has quietly but steadily released a stream of hacked and leaked documents, from Russian oligarchs’ emails to the stolen communications of Chilean military leaders to shell company databases. Late last week, the group unleashed its most high-profile leak yet: BlueLeaks, a 269-gigabyte collection of more than a million police files provided to DDoSecrets by a source aligned with the hacktivist group Anonymous, spanning emails, audio files, and interagency memos largely pulled from law enforcement “fusion centers,” which serve as intelligence-sharing hubs. According to DDoSecrets, it represents the largest-ever release of hacked US police data.”

Emma has done AMAs before! Make sure to check them out, related to DDoSecrets’ releases like Dark Side of the Kremlin, as well as their FOIA transparency work.

Twitter did not ban us, or even issue any warnings, after any of our previous publications of hacked data, such as the Cayman National Bank release, claimed by hacktivist Phineas Fisher, which was recently used for investigations in The Guardian/OCCRP about Azerbaijan’s former national security minister and coronavirus corruption in Armenia.

Leave us questions ahead of time, and we will begin to answer starting Sunday, July 12 @ 9:00 ET (15:00 CEST), continuing until 14:00 ET (20:00 CEST) or until we run out of steam/questions.