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'This Time It's Russia's Emails Getting Leaked' (thedailybeast.com)

"Russian oligarchs and Kremlin apparatchiks may find the tables turned on them," writes Kevin Poulsen at The Daily Beast, reporting on a new leak site that's unleashed "a compilation of hundreds of thousands of hacked emails and gigabytes of leaked documents."

"Think of it as WikiLeaks, but without Julian Assange's aversion to posting Russian secrets."

Slashdot reader hyades1 shared their report: The site, Distributed Denial of Secrets, was founded last month by transparency activists. Co-founder Emma Best said the Russian leaks, slated for release Friday, will bring into one place dozens of different archives of hacked material that, at best, have been difficult to locate, and in some cases appear to have disappeared entirely from the web. "Stuff from politicians, journalists, bankers, folks in oligarch and religious circles, nationalists, separatists, terrorists operating in Ukraine," said Best, a national-security journalist and transparency activist. "Hundreds of thousands of emails, Skype and Facebook messages, along with lots of docs...."

The site is a kind of academic library or a museum for leak scholars, housing such diverse artifacts as the files North Korea stole from Sony in 2014, and a leak from the Special State Protection Service of Azerbaijan.

The site's Russia section already includes a leak from Russia's Ministry of the Interior, portions of which detailed the deployment of Russian troops to Ukraine at a time when the Kremlin was denying a military presence there. Though some material from that leak was published in 2014, about half of it wasn't, and WikiLeaks reportedly rejected a request to host the files two years later, at a time when Julian Assange was focused on exposing Democratic Party documents passed to WikiLeaks by Kremlin hackers. "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."

The Russian documents were posted simultaneously on the DDoSecrets website and on the Internet Archive, notes the New York Times, adding that the new site has also posted a large archive of internal documents from WikiLeaks itself.

"Personally, I am disappointed by what I see as dishonest and egotistic behavior from Julian Assange and WikiLeaks," Best tells the Times. "But she added that she had made the Russian document collection available to WikiLeaks ahead of its public release on Friday, and had posted material favorable to Mr. Assange leaked from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has lived for more than six years to avoid arrest."

6 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. The files from Sony contain PII and PHI by Beeftopia · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There's all kinds of PII and PHI in that stolen information.

    I'm sure these folks don't care, because, like Assange, they're trolls. When they're helping your side, they're described with superlatives. When they're harming your side, they're described with expletives. They don't care. They just do what they do for their own personal reasons.

  2. Re: Proof, Citation? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There have been numerous leaks exposing Russian misbehavior, all of which are conspicuously absent from Wikileaks. Some of which are discussed in the fucking summary if you want a "citation."
    Wikileaks was an awesome idea, and then Assange destroyed it when he let his ego get the best of him and turned it into an anti American disinformation machine.

  3. Re: Implying Russia had something to do w DNC emai by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You said conspiracy theory like it was bullshit, and then deep state like itâ(TM)s real. Convenient. Tool.

  4. Re: Proof, Citation? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    The reason he did so is because he viewed the US as beholden to powerful international foreign anti-journalist criminal interests like Saudi Arabia and Israel and wanted to expose the worldwide surveillance was being used for evil.

    When Snowden leaked that trove and Assange became a pariah-with-teeth, he became an enemy of the state+8. That became a consuming distraction for him as... it probably would for most people. He's very human, flawed.

    I do think at one point they could have called him an independent journalist hack who didn't play by any rules but his own, but that's not much of a title or compliment really. Still, wikileaks did both good and bad things.

    To assume it's all black or white is to have no idea about how things really are. It's always both.

  5. Yeah by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    When Bernie was cheated out of the race, the Deep State did nothing to correct this wrongdoing. That demonstrates their corruption.

  6. Re: Proof, Citation? by Viol8 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "The reason he did so is because he viewed the US as beholden to powerful international foreign anti-journalist criminal interests like Saudi Arabia and Israel and wanted to expose the worldwide surveillance was being used for evil."

    Unlike the Russian government which is all teddy bears and moonbeams and under no circumstances would they shut down non governmental media outlets and order the extra judicial murders of journalists or poison former citizens on foreign soil. No no , not at all. Squeaky clean is Putin.

    Its fucking incredible that in the 21st century there are still pathetic Russian apologists in the west no matter what the Russians do. Whilst the Russia people are no better or worse than anyone else in the world, their politicians are and have been for at least 100 years, psychopathic scumbags who will literally do anything to gain and keep power.