Twitter bans Wikileaks-style DDoSecrets for leaking hacked US police documents

Twitter has shut down and banned the account of Wikileaks-style publisher Distributed Denial of Secrets (or DDoSecrets) after it had published a trove of leaked documents from US police agencies that were hacked by the Anonymous group.

The social media platform took down the account some time on Tuesday, just days after DDoSecrets published almost 269 GB worth of documents, images and videos the group said was taken from more than 200 US law enforcement agencies.

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“DDoSecrets collaborates with journalists and other researchers to publish information in the public interest. Our record speaks for itself and our collaborations with respected networks like [European Investigative Collaborations] and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project] should speak to our interest in documenting: corruption, crime, structural racism and more,” Lorax B. Horne, the editor-in-chief of DDoSecrets, told Al Arabiya English.

“I am extremely disappointed that a company that emoji hashtags #BlackLivesMatters and #Juneteenth is suppressing the publication of important records that document police surveillance of protestors, and worse,” Horne added.

The DDoS group derives its name from the technical term “denial of service attack,” a form of cyberattack that crashes servers and websites by targeting them with huge numbers of requests.

The database has published leaked documents from across the globe, including official US records on how Iranian-backed militias laundered money through used car sales and drug trafficking.

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