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Chronicles

The story behind the story

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Twitter permanently suspends @DDoSecrets account for violating distribution of hacked data policy after it shared links to data stolen from US law enforcement

Twitter said DDoSecrets account leaked and promoted BlueLeaks, a huge collection of files stolen from more than 200 US police departments and fusion training centers.

ZDNet Catalin Cimpanu

Context & Ripple Effects

The suspension lands just days after DDoSecrets published nearly 270 GB of files from hundreds of US police departmentsBlueLeaks is what triggered it, and Twitter's 'distribution of hacked data' rule is the instrument. It puts the collective in the same position WikiLeaks occupied: banned from its main megaphone but not from existence.

The corpus shows the ban did not stop the group: a later profile traces DDoSecrets back to its 2018 founding and documents continued releases spanning US law enforcement, Myanmar, Ukraine and Gab, followed by a 1TB dump of ransomware-stolen corporate data in January 2021 and the TeleMessage haul of stolen US government messages in May 2025.

First-order effects

  • DDoSecrets loses its highest-reach distribution channel mid-campaign: links to BlueLeaks now dead-end, forcing traffic onto its own site and mirrors at the moment of maximum attention.

Second-order effects

  • Law-enforcement interest in the same data cuts both ways — separate court filings show the FBI mined a leaked OGUsers forum database alongside Discord and Coinbase records to unmask the Twitter hackers, so published leaks function as investigative sources as well as journalism inputs.

Third-order effects

  • If the pattern holds across the collective's five-plus years of releases, hacked-material policies turn major platforms into de facto gatekeepers of transparency publishing, pushing activist archives toward self-hosted infrastructure while leaving the underlying data flow untouched.

The trend: Platform enforcement of hacked-data rules is reshaping how transparency collectives distribute stolen archives, decoupling their visibility from any single social network.

Discussion

  • @dellcam Dell Cameron Blm on x
    Twitter confirms it permanently banned a journalist organization for linking to leaked secret police files. #BlueLeaks https://gizmodo.com/...
  • @dangillmor Dan Gillmor on x
    Here's why Twitter's ban of DDoSecrets is a very very unfortunate move. From @arstechnica: https://arstechnica.com/...
  • @samred Sam Machkovech on x
    Twitter took Blueleaks' account down with a permanent suspension within 48 hours of document publication, while leaving nearly identical content live at a Wikileaks account for years. I'll give you one guess why. https://twitter.com/...
  • @gregghoush Gregg Housh on x
    This is bad news for everybody. Twitter Bans Journalist Organization for Linking to Leaked Secret Police Files https://gizmodo.com/...
  • @dellcam Dell Cameron Blm on x
    This happened in June 2019 after @DDoSecrets released the Perceptics files (company capturing license plate photos at the border). Twitter said at the time one of its “external partners” had mistakenly flagged the content as “unsafe.” Let's see what happens this time. https://twi…