Hundreds of thousands of files from dozens of law enforcement agencies in the United States have been dumped online, totalling a collection of nearly 270 gigabytes.
Distributed Denial Of Secrets, a collective of journalists, activists and technologists that provide a platform to leak sensitive data in service of the public interest, posted the collection on Friday, Juneteenth. The collective described the collection—codenamed BlueLeaks—as “ten years of data from over 200 police departments, fusion centers and other law enforcement training and support resources. Among the hundreds of thousands of documents are police and FBI reports, bulletins, guides and more.”
Security journalist Brian Krebs reported that a document he obtained from the National Fusion Center Association (NFCA) confirms the validity of the leaked data, and notes it contains highly sensitive information. The NFCA is an organization that represents the country’s fusion centers, controversial government organizations that collect and share data between police departments and other law enforcement agencies in the country including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.
“Additionally, the data dump contains emails and associated attachments,” the NFCA alert reads, according to KrebsOnSecurity. “Our initial analysis revealed that some of these files contain highly sensitive information such as ACH routing numbers, international bank account numbers (IBANs), and other financial data as well as personally identifiable information (PII) and images of suspects listed in Requests for Information (RFIs) and other law enforcement and government agency reports.”
Do you work or did you use to work at a police department? Or have you found some intersting data among this collection? We’d love to hear from you. You can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, OTR chat at lorenzofb@jabber.ccc.de, or email lorenzofb@vice.com
The alert said the data was taken from Nesential, a web developer that works with multiple fusion centers and law enforcement agencies, according to Krebs.
The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
People on Twitter are already sharing interesting tidbits from the collection, such as a purported FBI document that says white supremacist biker gangs have attended recent protests against police brutality while posing as antifascists in order to "portray Antifa as a greater threat than it actually poses" and used civil unrest as a cover to move large amounts of heroin.
In the wake of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, and the ensuing mass protests against police brutality all over the United States, this cache of files will surely be picked apart in search of further illuminating tidbits and evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the police.
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