How the transparency collective DDoSecrets eclipsed WikiLeaks

At its best, the work of DDoSecrets reveals the limits of official transparency, of authorized government leaks and incrementalist beat reporting and FOIA requests that yield pages of useless redactions. Nowhere is this more visible than with BlueLeaks. “Reading the unredacted, hacked documents gives a very different picture than the selections you get from an open records officer,” said Brendan McQuade, author of Pacifying the Homeland, a book about the modern surveillance state. Based on BlueLeaks information, he wrote articles that exposed police malfeasance and brought attention to a federal whistleblower suit against the Maine Information and Analysis Center, or MIAC. Maine’s state house later voted to close the site (although the bill never cleared the Senate). To McQuade, and to the members of DDoSecrets, hacked data provides what official channels cannot: truth and the potential for accountability.

DDoSecrets attracted criticism a few years ago for publishing—and then withdrawing—an archive hacked from the infidelity dating site Ashley Madison, an experience the group said it learned from. The BlueLeaks archive also included personal information, such as emails and home addresses, for roughly 700,000 law enforcement officers (though nothing has apparently come of that data dump). DDoSecrets is adamant that it doesn’t break the law or solicit hacked material. But its members are mingling with the hacktivist underground, which includes people engaging in potentially criminal behavior. Like many journalistic outfits, it does publish hacked and stolen material, but that remains a long-standing, legally protected practice of a free press. And these days, journalists often have to act much like spies to escape prosecution of whistleblowers and leakers. If the work of DDoSecrets has the whiff of the illicit, it’s because official secrecy, mass surveillance, threats of prosecution, and big tech’s cooperation with censorious authorities have impeded the ability of journalists and publishers of leaked data alike to operate.

Freddy Martinez wondered if somehow the broken systems of democratic accountability that gave rise to DDoSecrets could be repaired. “Maybe we’ll become irrelevant, which might be nice,” he said. For now, the group has become a 501(c)(3) and collects small donations. It has also formed a partnership with Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science and established a legal defense fund for Best, a journalist who is believed to be the main target in the federal investigation. (For three months this year, the FBI prevented them from filing FOIA requests, before lifting its ban in June.)

“Truth has an impact, regardless of the respectability politics some people choose to engage in when it comes to the alleged sources,” Best wrote after Swiss law enforcement, at the request of U.S. authorities, arrested Tillie Kottmann, a hacker who alerted journalists to security vulnerabilities in a vast commercial network of surveillance cameras. “The world can no longer be rid of hacktivists or leaktivists. Not as long as people are willing.”

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3D88vku