Content warning: This article includes excerpts and quotes which contain unedited homophobic and transphobic language as well as threats of violence from members of the far-right and militias.
From February 2021 to at least February 2022, militia leaders played a key role in the stalking, harassment and spread of misinformation about myself, my family and members of DDoSecrets, even suggesting we be murdered.
In early February 2021, I received a tip about a militia website that was, for whatever reason, displaying the organization’s internal member information, including their names and other personally identifiable information (PII). I looked into the website’s leak of American Patriots Three Percent (AP III) member information, and decided to share it with the public. In doing so, a chain reaction began in which DDoSecrets, my family and I were all targeted by the militia and other right-wing figures in a campaign of harassment and doxing.
The tip was simple: the website AP III used to process and vet membership applications at the time, apiiimembership.online, was displaying the members’ identities and contact information. This had first been archived several days before, but not made public. I was happy to help change that. We now know from leaked AP III chat logs that even as the site’s innards were exposed, they were actively using the site to process membership applications. A month later, The Guardian reported on the data, much to AP III’s dismay.
AP III’s interpretation of the leak varied, but the effect was immediate: paranoia and fury. The site was shut down, and theories spread blaming the leak on an insider, on website vulnerabilities and on hackers. Messages later posted to AP III’s state and national leadership chats indicate that they believed the website was hacked on two separate occasions, at least one of which they blamed on WordPress plugin vulnerabilities and malware.
Before long, the AP III State Leader’s chat noticed my tweet from February 9th linking to “a Three Percenter group doxing its members.” Believing that the leak was purely the result of AP III misconfiguring their system, I ended the tweet with the mocking line that “WordPress is hard.”
On the 10th, AP III founder Scot Seddon posted a call for information on the person who doxed them, and the militia immediately focused on me and tried to find a physical location for me. Taking the location in my Twitter profile literally, their first stop was Walkin Street, Rockland. I’m with you in Rockland, where you’re at Finnegan’s wake. They found a lot of people named Emma Best in Rockland’s in Maryland, New Hampshire, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas and Vermont – none of whom were me.
On the one hand, this is hilarious. They were looking for me in all the wrong places based off a pair of jokes, and were overwhelmed with false positives. On the other hand, they were finding uninvolved to people to potentially target.
They quickly began moving onto conspiracy theories. One member of the AP III State Leaders chat said that from what he had found, “Emma Best is not a single person but yet [sic] a group set up like the SPLC just to find info the left can use against conservatives and patriots.” Other members of the chat said they doubted that Emma Best was a real name for a person, saying it “sounds like a made up name,” having forgotten the numerous people with that they found in different states. (Plus, all names are made up and it is my real name.) Despite one person pointing out that they should be more concerned with where or who I got the files from and people in the chat were clearly looking at my Twitter thread, they seemingly never noticed that I acknowledged my source in it, with their permission.
Perhaps they misunderstood the attribution, or perhaps they simply seized on another bizarre leap of logic after seeing one of my posts. One of the members made the odd announcement in the State Leader’s chat that “If they know our sight [sic] is down they have hacked it.” Other theories began to be floated, with AP III founder Scot Seddon suggested it was a disgruntled former member due to the fact that the information had been archived for several days before it had been posted.
The militia’s search for me continued the next day and Ed, the same conspiracy theorist as before, returned with new “information” (all of which was incorrect) that he said he couldn’t verify and which had been passed to him from an unnamed source. Ed claimed that I was 63 years old, and had been in Washington D.C. on January 6th where my vendetta against AP III allegedly began, and accused me of being a pedophile. 27 minutes later, Ed posted a different unfounded conspiracy theory about me, saying that my account was actually “a group of leftest [sic] that only post info to have patriots doxed. They also work with a site called the grinder that is nothing but a leftest doxing page that has a few hundred that only dox patriots all day everyday.”
Meanwhile, the AP III State Leaders continued hunting for DDoSecrets’ members. They obsessed over the members page, and pulled the paperwork associated with the non-profit to try to get addresses. They noticed that my wife was a member of the group, and began stalking everyone. They mistakenly thought my dead name would help reveal my location, and found a still image from a years old TV appearance. They tried to identify the city from the background, not realizing the image had been superimposed by the studio.
On the 13th, John, of AP III’s national commanders, posted a 2 minute message to the State Leader chat instructing members to stalk my social media accounts and look for references to locations I had been, trips I had taken, and anything that he could use to help narrow down my location. He bragged about having run background checks on everyone in DDoSecrets, but said he’d been unable to run one on me – or rather on “Emily Best.” John said he didn’t think “Emily Best” was my real name and brought up something he called a “biological name.” (Apparently transphobes think pronouns aren’t real, but that names are assigned to us biologically.)
On the 17th, Ed returned to the State Leaders’ chat to say that he had recruited others that wanted to take part in a doxing campaign, and that they had settled on mass reporting accounts that they thought were associated with me. Ed said that “so far no anti doxing laws have been broken,” and claimed responsibility for my wife’s Twitter account being suspended. As far as we could tell at the time, the alleged violation was fabricated and Twitter cited their posts about the contents of BlueLeaks.
At the end of February, news of GabLeaks broke and the far-right immediately went into overdrive. Andrew Torba, Gab’s CEO, seemed to blame DDoSecrets not just for publishing the leak but for the hack. In a post he blamed “mentally ill tranny demon hackers” before immediately clarifying that he was “very serious” and describing a DHS bulletin that’s had its claims discredited. In other posts, he went as far as repeating the charge and posting pictures of members of DDoSecrets. Someone forwarded a post to the State Leaders chat with my picture and a number of erroneous claims, from incorrectly blaming me for the hack, to conflating the news of the hack with the date of the hack, to saying the “demon hacker” label had been “self-proclaimed” instead of reappropriated after Torba’s slur, to misunderstanding what was in the data.
In response they repeated the accusation that I had hacked AP III before, and suggested that I should be hacked “into itty bitty” pieces “with an axe.”
Members of the chat went on to discuss working with law enforcement. One member said he might call an FBI agent who had apparently visited him the month prior, while another suggested finding some other way “to find this fuck and turn them in to the police.”
Several days later, AP III’s State Leaders hadn’t forgotten. One suggested that they should work together with Andrew Torba, suggesting that if Torba filed a case against me, they could either join a lawsuit or seek to add charges. One of my (recently arrested) stalkers seems to have provided Torba with information, in addition to harassing, doxing and spreading false information about members of DDoSecrets.
For the next year, there seem to be no mention of me or DDoSecrets in the leaked AP III chats. In mid-February 2022, we returned to their attention when John forwarded a post from an account called “Covid Red Pills.” In a typo and conspiracy theory ridden-post, “Covid Red Pills” falsely said that DDoSecrets was “taking credit for the GiveSendGo hack” on Telegram before hedging by adding “or is at least associated with the data dump.” (This misunderstands the order of events and how the information was released.)
In what appears to be the last mention of myself or DDoSecrets in the Paramilitary Leaks, John added the accusation that we had hacked AP III on their other site, prompting another member to suggest they do the same in return – “and then make some house calls.”
Thankfully, AP III has never made any house calls and my stalkers and doxers have never gotten further than posting pictures and the address of my old apartment – though they incorrectly believed I still lived there at the time. The harassment targeted me and my family, members of DDoSecrets and seemingly random people that were thought to work with or near me. It continued for years, and Torba and others continue to spread misinformation related to DDoSecrets.
In the end, it’s better that they targeted me and ignored my actual source, whose trail has now long gone cold.
