Emma Best (journalist)

Emma Best is an American investigative reporter and whistleblower. They gained national attention for their work with WikiLeaks and activist Julian Assange. Best is known for prolific filing of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests on behalf of MuckRock and co-founding the whistleblower site Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets).

During the Trump administration, Best was also known for reporting on the FBI files of President Donald Trump, his associate Roger Stone, and a company owned by then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

Best has been called fearless, provocative, "a former hacker" and a "journalist and transparency advocate with a specialty in counterintelligence and national security".

Career
Best has said that before becoming a transparency activist and investigative journalist, they worked for Wikistrat and subcontractors hired by the Intelligence Community before becoming disillusioned. They left over concerns for source safety and bureaucratic obstruction, and have discussed disillusionment about surveillance, police militarization, and expansion of the military. Best said in 2020 that they hadn't kept in touch with old colleagues.

Activism
In July 2016, Best uploaded 3,471 issues of TIME Magazine from 1923 to 2014 to be freely available online. This may have violated TIME's terms and conditions. Best released a statement that included a quote the magazine's founder, Henry R Luce: "Journalism is the art of collecting varying kinds of information (commonly called news) which a few people possess and of transmitting it to a much larger number of people who are supposed to desire to share it".

Freedom of Information Act
From 2016 to 2020, Best filed more than 6,000 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, including numerous requests to U.S. intelligence services and over 1,600 with the FBI, and published hundreds of articles.

In 2016, the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated and considered prosecuting Best for their use of FOIA. According to the Calyx Institute, Best "consistently sits at or near the top of FBI's list of vexsome FOIA requesters."

In 2017, Best helped get the CIA database of 13 million pages of declassified files online. That year, Best also filed a FOIA lawsuit against the FBI for their files on the Church of Scientology. In 2019, Best and former NSA hacker Emily Crose embarked on a project to use FOIA to get documents on historical hacking incidents, called “Hacking History.” That year, Best filed another FOIA lawsuit against the FBI for their file on the Church Committee.

In 2020, Best said they were concerned that the government was using the COVID-19 pandemic "as an obstructive step."

In 2021, the FBI banned Best from filing FOIA requests, and their existing requests were closed. With the help of national security attorneys Mark Zaid and Brad Moss, the ban was lifted after several months and their requests were reopened.

WikiLeaks
Before DDoSecrets, Best had joined a narrow group of WikiLeaks contributors before falling out with Julian Assange, accusing him, among other things, of having lied about the source of the DNC email leak, and the incomplete nature of its archive of John Podesta's emails. Best has published several of WikiLeaks' own leaked documents.

On 19 July 2016, in response to the Turkish government's purges that followed the coup attempt, WikiLeaks released 294,548 emails from Turkey's ruling Justice and Development party (AKP). Most experts agree that Phineas Fisher was behind the leak. On 21 July, WikiLeaks tweeted a link to a database which contained sensitive information, such as the Turkish Identification Number, of approximately 50 million Turkish citizens. The information was not in the files uploaded by WikiLeaks, but in files described by WikiLeaks as "the full data for the Turkey AKP emails and more", which was archived by Best, who then removed it when the personal data was discovered.

In mid-August 2016, Guccifer 2.0 expressed interest in offering a trove of Democratic e-mails to Best. Best tries to negotiate the hosting of stolen DNC emails and documents on the internet archive. Assange urged Best to decline, intimating that he was in contact with the persona's handlers, and that the material would have greater impact if he released it first. The conversation ends with "Guccifer 2.0" saying he will send the material directly to WikiLeaks.

In November 2018, they leaked sealed chat logs that were part of the case against Assange.

In April 2019, they revealed that Chelsea Manning's FBI files were central to the ongoing proceedings against Assange before the indictment was unsealed.

In July 2022, Best was the first to discover that WikiLeaks had launched a new submission portal after being offline for months. The system didn’t work and then shut down completely.

Distributed Denial of Secrets
On December 3, 2018, Best co-founded Distributed Denial of Secrets with another member of the group known as The Architect. Best’s work at WikiLeaks laid the foundation for the group to come together. According to Best, The Architect, whom they already knew, approached them and expressed their desire to see a new platform for leaked and hacked materials, along with other relevant datasets.

In July 2020, three agents who identified themselves as part of Homeland Security Investigations visited a woman in Boston to question her about BlueLeaks, Distributed Denial of Secrets and Emma Best. The agents asked the woman about her involvement with BlueLeaks before eventually asking her to become an informant, and offered to pay for any information that led to arrests.

As of January 2021, the site hosts dozens of terabytes of data.

In February 2021, Distributed Denial of Secrets leaked 70 gigabytes of data from the far right social media platform Gab, including email addresses, passwords, and internal emails; the group referred to the action as "GabLeaks".

In 2022, Best and Distributed Denial of Secrets joined in the information war being fought by Russia and Ukraine by publishing lots of information leaked from inside Russia.

Commentary and beliefs
Best believes in radical transparency. Best explained their motivations by saying that "getting and publishing government documents means that with five years’ effort, you can change 50 years of history."

For Best, freeing information is a step toward safety. They said “it’s impossible to walk through the world and not be keenly aware of its absence.” Best added that "queer people are attracted to transparency because we’re forced into closets and into confronting broken and abusive systems"

In 2022, Best said "I don’t long for any nationality. I’m not happy to be called an American. It’s accurate. I’m not happy about it." They said it was because of "Imperialism. Uber-capitalism. Neo-colonialism, military expansion, pansurveillance, militarization of police, the police system itself." The same year, they said that "the leaking will continue until morality improves."

In the media and the arts
Best was part of Vice's roundtable of technologists, hackers, and journalists that dissected the fourth season of Mr. Robot.

In 2022, Best presented a talk called "Leak The Planet: Veritatem cognoscere non pereat mundus" and a fireside policy chat at DEF CON, an annual hacker gathering in Las Vegas.

Personal life
Emma Best lives in Boston. They are queer and nonbinary, and are married to fellow DDoSecrets member Xan North. In 2018, Best's passport application was denied and paperwork with their application disappeared. After Best published private WikiLeaks chats in 2018, Julian Assange’s personal Twitter account cited their transgender status and dismissed them as a disgruntled activist. Assange's account was locked until the tweet was deleted for violating Twitter rules.

After the publication of "GabLeaks" in 2021, Gab CEO Andrew Torba released a statement in which he referred to the leakers as "mentally ill tranny demon hackers". Best said that the incident left them with "the constant awareness that many of the people we publish data [about], at best, do not care about the quality of life for people like me unless it’s profitable for them in some way, and many others would gladly cheer on or commit violence against queer people like me just for existing." After Barrett "Brown's life spiraled" in 2021, he accused Best and other members of DDoSecrets of faking being transgender to obscure their histories in the intelligence community.