Hey Travis, Joseph here with some news on the transparency front. Distributed Denial of Secret (DDoSecrets) has just published a full-as-possible archive of data on Wikileaks' website for anyone to access. The reason? Wikileaks' site has been falling apart for years. After Assange's plea deal, DDoSecrets took to publishing this data, one of the cofounders told me. You can find the full story below.

The transparency activism organization Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) published copies of data available on Wikileaks’ website onto their own site on Sunday. The move comes after Wikileaks founder Julian Assange entered a plea agreement, part of which involved him deleting any unpublished classified information that Wikileaks hasn’t publicized and signing an affidavit stating he had done so.

Emma Best, a cofounder of DDoSecrets, told 404 Media that Assange’s plea deal crystalized the idea of archiving Wikileaks’ content and making it more easily accessible. Much of the Wikileaks website over the years has fallen into disrepair, with some downloads being unavailable. Ultimately, the original data on Wikileaks’ site might disappear, Best said.

Wikileaks “has the problem of being a centralized point of failure,” Best said, adding that DDoSecrets will make its guide for mirroring its own data more prominent, in hopes of making its data more resilient. “We’re just providing the raw information they published themselves,” Best said.  

The mirrored Wikileaks data includes the Yemen files, which are files about the “Office for Military Cooperation from the United States Embassy in Sana'a, Yemen;” Vault 7, which contained technical information about the CIA’s hacking capabilities, and emails from Hilary Clinton’s private email server.

Archiving Wikileaks’ data also means archiving data that Wikileaks has been criticized for publishing. One example is Wikileaks’ publications of the Saudi Cables, which the Associated Press reported in 2016 included 124 medical files and details on a Saudi man arrested for being gay. “They published everything: my phone, address, name, details,” a Saudi man whose involvement in a paternity dispute was allegedly revealed in the filings told the AP. “If the family of my wife saw this ... Publishing personal stuff like that could destroy people.”

Best told 404 Media the raw database of the Saudi Cables is included in DDoSecrets’ mirror “because we want to preserve as complete a copy of the Wikileaks data as possible.”

“While we likely would have handled that data differently than WikiLeaks did, the data is out there and we shouldn't act as censors for it,” Best said.

Best and Lorax Horne, an editor for DDoSecrets, announced the publication of the Wikileaks material, along with a revamp of the DDoSecrets website, at the Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) conference.

DDoSecrets launched in 2018, and quickly became a home for large scale datasets. That includes BlueLeaks, a 270GB mountain of data that a hacker stole related to U.S. law enforcement agencies. That dump led to a myriad of articles about surveillance and police activity, with some outlets publishing stories as recently as last December. In response to DDoSecrets’ distribution of that material and others, social media platforms have throttled the organization's reach, and governments have blocked access. In 2020, WIRED described DDoSecrets as picking up where Wikileaks left off.

Best said DDoSecrets is also launching two projects under the organization: the Library of Leaks, which will be responsible for preserving existing data and coordinating with outside groups. Disclosure Without Borders, meanwhile, will be focused on the more delicate work of new publications and source protections. “By beginning to separate the projects, it’ll make it easier to bring new people in to help with LoL [Library of Leaks], which is far less sensitive than new publications and communicating with sources,” Best said.

“​​We want to structure things so that they have long-term stability, both on a technical level and in terms of community involvement. We need journalists, activists and researchers to play that role because without that input, we're more likely to have problems, bottlenecks or limitations that we don't see—and more than that, it puts the world's largest library of secrets in the hands of the transparency community that it shares an ecosystem with. There's too much information that's too important for its handling and care to be ultimately left to a small group,” Best added.

As for Wikileaks, its website has been falling apart for years, with multiple datasets being unavailable for download, The Daily Dot reported in 2022. At the time, even the main search function on the site did not work, the outlet wrote.

In June Assange pleaded guilty to conspiring to obtain and disclose classified national defense information in a U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands courtroom, and was given a 62 month time-served sentence for his time inside a UK prison battling extradition to the U.S. The charges specifically related to his work with Chelsea Manning in leaking classified material.

Best said they have not communicated with Wikileaks about the data mirroring. Wikileaks did not respond to a request for comment.