A new transparency group (DDoSecrets) posted 10 years of data from over 200 police departments in a massive data breach of US law enforcement ‘fusion centers’

Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoS, is a volunteer group launched in 2019 to provide researchers and journalists with a central repository where they can find terabytes of hacked and leaked documents. You can think of DDoSecrets (a play on the name of a type of cyberattack called a “distributed denial of service”) as an alternative to Wikileaks. In some cases the group hosts the same material as Wikileaks.

This last Friday, the group posted a trove of 269GB of data from over 200 police departments, fusion centers and other law enforcement training and support resources. Among the hundreds of thousands of documents are police and FBI reports, bulletins, guides and the secret law enforcement documents that detail numerous practices of law enforcement.

The ten years of documents also include things like how Google keeps user files on all Google users and then passes them to law enforcement. The documents also contain information about how license plate readers are used to track activists left and right. on Twitter, the group describes itself as: “Archiving and publishing leaked & hacked data of public interest. Veritatem cognoscere ruat cælum et pereat mundus.”

In a Twitter post, the group said:

Ten years of data from over 200 police departments, fusion centers and other law enforcement training and support resources. Among the hundreds of thousands of documents are police and FBI reports, bulletins, guides and more.

https://twitter.com/DDoSecrets/status/1274086005461716992

According to the information on its website, below is how the group describes itself:

Distributed Denial of Secrets (“DDOS”) is a transparency collective, aimed at enabling the free transmission of data in the public interest. We aim to avoid any political, corporate or personal leanings, and to act as a simple beacon of available information. As a collective, we do not support any cause, idea or message beyond ensuring that information is available to those who need it most – the people.

While we are happy to serve as an index to data of all varities, all must meet the following two criteria:

• Is the data of public interest?
• Can a prima facie case be made for the veracity of the contents?

Unless already public, or as authorized by our source, we do not disclose the providing party of any received information, and we are fully commited to ensuring their anonymity from all threats. We can never advise on the perfect procedure for transferring data to us or anyone else, but we can act as a shield for that process and share advice from our experience. Often our role is to not just make data available, but to act as a anonymity guard to pass data to journalists and other figures best positioned to interrogate it.