How the transparency collective DDoSecrets eclipsed Julian Assange. From a report: Whereas WikiLeaks cultivated an anti-imperialist mystique centered on the cultish figure of Assange, DDoSecrets professes something more modest: an unvarnished commitment to providing information useful to journalists and concerned citizens. As the DDoSecrets website puts it, data must fulfill two criteria: “Is it in the public interest?” and “Can a prima facie case be made for the veracity of its contents?” If it passes that test — and the group, which now has approximately 10 members along with an advisory board and volunteer contributors, decides collectively that they can protect their sources — then they publish the archive, sometimes as an easily downloadable torrent, other times through its slightly more difficult to reach onion site, which requires using the Tor browser. While many archives are published for a wide audience, others are withheld and only offered to journalists upon request; and in some cases, the organization will write about data it receives without publishing its contents.
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.
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