“I think the bans are simple attempts to slow or stop the spread of the information and news,” Emma Best, a co-founder of DDoSecrets, told The Intercept. (For the record, I’m a member of DDoSecrets’ advisory board.) German authorities have seized a server belonging to DDoSecrets that was hosting BlueLeaks data, leaving BitTorrent as the only way the data is currently being distributed by the organization. Following Twitter’s example, Reddit banned the r/blueleaks forum - citing its policy against posting personal information - where users discussed articles based on leaked documents and their own findings from digging through the BlueLeaks data. Twitter is implementing these policies arbitrarily for example, the WikiLeaks Twitter account and links to are still accessible despite the large amount of hacked material that WikiLeaks has published. Twitter has also taken the unprecedented step of blocking all links to, falsely claiming, to users who click that the website may be malicious. The data, stolen from 251 different law enforcement websites by the hacktivist collective Anonymous, was mostly taken from fusion center websites (including many of those listed on DHS’s website), though some of the hacked websites were for local police departments, police training organizations, members-only associations for cops or retired FBI agents, and law enforcement groups specifically dedicated to investigating organized retail crime, drug trafficking, and working with industry.Īfter the BlueLeaks data was published, Twitter has permanently suspended the DDoSecrets Twitter account, citing a policy against distributing hacked material. Last month, the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets published 269 gigabytes of law enforcement data on its website and using the peer-to-peer file sharing technology BitTorrent. Fusion centers have also been criticized for privacy and civil liberties violations such as infiltrating and spying on anti-war activists. Yet in 2012 the Senate found that fusion centers have “not produced useful intelligence to support Federal counterterrorism efforts,” that the majority of the reports fusion centers produced had no connection to terrorism at all, and that the reports were low quality and often not about illegal activity. So Congress directed the newly formed Department of Homeland Security to form “fusion centers” across the country, collaborations between federal agencies like DHS and the FBI with state and local police departments, to share intelligence and prevent future terrorist attacks. Local, state and federal law enforcement agencies had their own separate surveillance databases that possibly could have prevented the attacks, but they didn’t communicate any of this information with each other. government realized it had an information sharing problem. AFTER FAILING TO PREVENT the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S.