Transparency Activists Dump 1.8 Terabytes Of Police Helicopter Surveillance Footage

from the you've-let-us-down,-Dr.-Whirlington-Spinblade dept

Let's just get right into this and let Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS) harvest some accolades and encouragement to continue to deploy its particular brand of intrusive transparency on historically secretive entities.

The transparency activist group Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoSecrets, posted a 1.8-terabyte trove of police helicopter footage to its website on Friday. DDoSecrets cofounder Emma Best says that her group doesn’t know the identity of the source who shared the data and that no affiliation or motivation for leaking the files was given. The source simply said that the two police departments were storing the data in unsecured cloud infrastructure.

The lesson here (one of many) is that if you can't adequately protect your secrets, maybe you don't deserve to have them. And there are plenty of secrets to be had here. It's not that people aren't aware police helicopters are circling overland at all hours of the day. Episodes of COPS and YouTube collections of high-speed chases have made that fact common knowledge.

The DDoS release shows law enforcement agencies aren't just deploying choppers to keep an eye on suspects in motion. They're also using them to engage in extended surveillance of people suspected of nothing, hovering over large gatherings and deploying infrared cameras to peer inside of buildings just for the fuck of it.

Putting your stuff in the cloud means opening up additional attack vectors for those seeking your secrets. That appears to be the root source of this new leak. What a time to be alive!

I mean, sure there's more surveillance than ever. But the reliance on (apparently unreliable) private contractors means government secrets are only a hack away with being shared with everyone on the planet. That's definitely good news for the policed, who often have no say in how they're surveilled and are routinely denied access to information about government surveillance tech.

There's an amazing amount of irony contained in this latest DDoS release. Just a couple of months ago, the Dallas PD was being raked over the coals by pissed off city officials for inexplicably deleting more than 22 terabytes of data. According to the cops, the city IT employee handling the transfer of data from the cloud to Dallas PD servers screwed things up, resulting in the mass deletion. Some of it was recoverable. Most of it wasn't. At best, 7.5 terabytes were permanently lost during the botched transfer.

Good news is in the eye of the beholder. Transparency enthusiasts will obviously love this new set of leaks from Distributed Denial of Secrets. And this new leak may allow the Dallas PD to recover more of the data it thought it had lost forever, as David Lee points out for Courthouse News Service.

Data transparency activists released a massive 600-hour leak of mostly Dallas Police Department helicopter footage, raising more questions about the city’s data security protocols three months after DPD admitted to a 22-terabyte deletion of case data that resulted in the release of criminal defendants awaiting trial.

I hate to laugh at the turntables, but try and spin this, DJ DPDPR. RAISE ALL THE QUESTIONS!

If an entity wants to be entrusted with the power to deploy warrantless surveillance provided it has enough downwash, it should be expected to protect the hundreds of hours of footage it's gathered. And if it can't manage a data transfer with losing at least a third of its 22 TB of data, it should probably allow transparency activists to perform its archival duties for it, considering how much better they are at preserving data and making it easily accessible.

Filed Under: dallas pd, helicopter video, police surveillance, surveillance, transparency
Companies: distributed denial of secrets

Emma Best's New Transparency Project Targets Russian Leaks She Says Wikileaks Refuses To Touch

from the actual-transparency dept

Turnabout, as they say, is only fair play.

If you hadn't noticed, Wikileaks isn't quite the transparency operation it used to be. Staffers who routinely helped rein in Assange's less noble impulses long ago left the effort behind, leaving us with the often bizarre comedy that is Wikileaks in 2019. And while that doesn't justify the misguided DNC lawsuit or the potential threat to transparency posed by government efforts to prosecute leakers, that doesn't change one undeniable fact: modern Wikileaks is increasingly seen in infosec and policy circles as a poorly-written joke, long-since buried under the rubble of numerous scandals and Assange's bulbous ego.

That's not to say that Wikileaks didn't provide an invaluable service in its prime. Its early operations lit a much-needed fire under a press routinely terrified of speaking truth to power, especially in regards to the United States' often bipartisan, mindless unchecked international militarism. These days, however, Wikileaks is more about pandering to MAGA kids for bitcoin donations, selectively avoiding transparency, and levying silly legal threats against the press rather than actually adhering to its core mission of a decade ago.

Still, there's no doubt that Wikileaks of old contributed to a marginally braver press, even if it remains obvious that a lot of work on this front still needs to be done. And its influence continues to be mirrored by subsequent incarnations looking to improve on the formula, even as those efforts criticize Wikileaks' increasingly erratic behavior in the wake of a percussive parade of unflattering revelations.

Case in point: transparency activist and long-time infosec reporter Emma Best has unveiled the creation of Distributed Denial of Secrets. The organization is expected to make waves this week with the publication of hundreds of thousands of hacked emails and gigabytes of leaked documents, some of which come from previous hacks of Putin aides like Vladislav Surkov.

Unlike Wikileaks, DDoS will focus more on compiling and curating information, much of it coming from past hacks and breaches, building a sort of museum and library of now easily-accessible information. Especially information related to the Russian government and its bone-grafted relationship to Russian organized crime; stuff, project supporters claim, Wikileaks has steered clear of in recent years:

"A lot of what WikiLeaks will do is organize and re-publish information that’s appeared elsewhere,” said Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute. “They’ve never done that with anything out of Russia."

DDoS differs from WikiLeaks in that it doesn’t solicit direct leaks of unpublished data—its focus is on compiling, organizing, and curating leaks that have already appeared somewhere in public. “Emma Best, I think, is someone who will actually do a good job,” said Weaver, citing Best’s aggressive use of the Freedom of Information Act to extract documents from recalcitrant U.S. agencies. “Things get so scattered that putting it all into one place is a huge benefit."

According to the group's FAQ, the biggest difference between itself and Wikileaks is it won't advocate for any particular ideology, putting the data itself back as the priority, a concept pretty clearly lost by Wikileaks in recent years:

"Distributed Denial of Secrets (“DDOS”) is a transparency collective, aimed at enabling the free transmission of data in the public interest. We aim to avoid any political, corporate or personal leanings, and to act as a simple beacon of available information. As a collective, we do not support any cause, idea or message beyond ensuring that information is available to those who need it most - the people."

Needless to say, Best and company are trying to manage the "creeping paranoia" that comes with playing information patty cake with Vlad and friends, having already mitigated what she calls "cyber shenanigans" the group believes was aimed at disrupting Friday's information dump. Also needless to say, this new operation, like operations before it, will likely be challenged by criticism when it comes to determining how far such transparency efforts should go (in fact it already has). But the fact remains that as long as the press refuses to fully embrace transparency, there's an evolving role for organizations just like this one.

In the interim, Best has been having fun with Wikileaks supporters who haven't been handling her criticism of the organization particularly well:

If you've been tuned in to Wikileaks and its newer supporters' aggressive disdain for even the most tempered criticism, things should definitely get interesting when the full data trove drops this week.

Filed Under: emma best, journalism, julian assange, leaks, russia
Companies: ddos, distributed denial of secrets, wikileaks