"Our role is to archive and publish leaked and hacked data of potential public interest," writes the group’s cofounder, Emma Best, a longtime transparency activist, in a text message interview with WIRED. "We want to inspire people to come forward, and release accurate information regardless of its source."
In another message, Best sums up that mission in a Latin phrase that better captures the adversarial nature—and inherent controversy—of DDoSecrets’ work: "Veritatem cognoscere ruat cælum et pereat mundus." Best translates the slogan to, "Know the truth, though the heavens may fall and the world burn."
From the start, DDoSecrets has distinguished itself by its willingness to publish not just the same sort of raw leaks and hacked files that WikiLeaks published for years, but also some that even WikiLeaks refused to.
For DDoSecrets, the firefight has already started. On Tuesday evening, as media attention grew around the BlueLeaks release, Twitter banned the group’s account, citing a policy that it doesn’t allow the publication of hacked information. The company followed up with an even more drastic step, removing tweets that link to the DDoSecrets website, which maintains a searchable database of all of its leaks, and suspending some accounts retroactively for linking to the group’s material.
To be honest they are wasting their time with any social network hosted in the USA as I see even their Reddit community was removed. It also seems that Julian Assange had more selectivity about what and to whom he released information, so we can expect that what follows will be more extreme. Problem with these leaks is they could potentially expose political and corporate fraud and corruption but also possibly genuinely secret information that should not be released. The challenge with this is we have 150+ countries in the world and one country’s evil is another country’s good, and vice versa. One country’s terrorist is another country’s freedom fighter. It’s one big global world… Are you hacking for good or bad?
See An embattled group of leakers picks up the WikiLeaks mantle
DDoSecrets was banned from Twitter after releasing hacked law enforcement files.