This unique panel brought together leading journalists who published and investigated leaked emails from the Epstein files, exposing his network of collaborators and enablers in one of the most explosive political scandals in decades. Members of the panel discussed receiving the leaks, preserving files removed by the Department of Justice, protecting the privacy of Epstein’s victims, and the process and fallout of investigating and reporting on the explosive files.
The discussion was joined by Kyrie, a hacker who gained access to Jeffrey Epstein’s emails and later provided a copy to Distributed Denial of Secrets.
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M.C.: It’s an unique opportunity, I don’t want to take up any time, so I’ll pass to our moderator, Alex.
Alex Urbelis: Thank you. Thank you, Max, for that wonderfully brief introduction. Appreciate that, yeah. Brevity is the soul of wit, as they say, so he’s a very soulful man. Anyhow, I’d like to introduce our really, really wonderful panel here. We have Raphael Satter, one of our resident journalists from Reuters. Mikael Thalen. Mikael, remind me of your outfit, the journalist’s outfit.
Mikael Thalen: Straight Arrow News.
Alex Urbelis: There we go, yep, Straight Arrow News. And Emma Best, whom we all know from Distributed Denial of Secrets. And a very special guest we have joining us today, remotely, without any video, without any audio. And we’ll only be typing into the chat that only I can see, in which I will read to the audience. And that hacker’s name is Kyrie. And the reason why we’re being a little bit clandestine today is because this is one of the hackers that breached the Epstein files and handed them over to Distributed Denial of Secrets. So, operational security, obviously.
Alex Urbelis: Thank you, Kyrie. And I’m Alexander Urbelis. You guys know me probably from Off The Hook for 2600. I’m the general counsel and the CISO of the Ethereum Name Service, and the incoming executive director of the Ethereum Name Service Foundation as well. So, with that, I want to jump right into this really wonderful panel that we have here. And hopefully move the slides along a little bit. Let’s see. Can we do that? Yes. So, let’s just jump right into it. And I’m going to hand this one over to Mikel and to Raphael. And this is about what leaked here.
Alex Urbelis: So, I want you guys, both of you, to talk to our audience here for a moment, because not everybody has followed this with the same granular level of detail that many of us on the stage have done so. So, what’s actually in this data set? What’s in this corpus of emails? And could you both talk a little bit about, and let’s start with Mikael first, about what made this different from anything else that was previously public about the Epstein files?
Mikael Thalen: Yeah. So, a hacker group known as Handala, who you may or may not have heard of, that’s widely believed to be a front for the Iranian government, obtained 100,000 emails from the inbox of Ehud Barak, who was the former Israeli prime minister from 1999 to 2001. And so, these emails range from about 2007 to 2016, which is during a period when he was actually the defense minister from 2007 to 2013 in Israel as well. And so, a lot of them had to do with his business relationship with Epstein. They were trying to, or they started in 2015, a security startup where they were trying to make connections in the surveillance world. And so, they had outreach to people like Peter Thiel, of course, of Palantir, two people described as being in the inner circle of Vladimir Putin, as well as the former director of signals intelligence for Israel.
Mikael Thalen: So, those were a lot of the emails, but I think the most interesting part was probably the emails about the personal relationship between Ehud Barak and Epstein. And so, essentially, these emails were obtained by Handala, and then they were obtained by DDoSecrets, and then I got my hands on them.
Alex Urbelis: All right. Raphael, anything you want to add to that? What’s new? What’s interesting? Your own personal opinion? What do you think?
Raphael Satter: I have no personal opinions, of course.
Alex Urbelis: Yeah, that would be a first. That would be a first. Yeah.
Raphael Satter: So, I think maybe backing up a little bit for the audience is that people talk about the Epstein files, but that that there is no kind of central repository of files about Epstein, right? So, there are files that were seized by investigators during the two investigations into Jeffrey Epstein, right? There are sealed court documents, some of which were unsealed recently. Those kind of sometimes referred to as the Epstein files.
Raphael Satter: And then there are things like the kinds of things that Mikael is talking about, which are files that have been obtained maybe covertly or illicitly or in some other way. And that, I think, in some ways has provided us some of the most visceral look at the kinds of the social circle, the business circle that Epstein was in. And, but even these are subdivided into different breaches or different hacks. So, there’s the Handala hack Mikael was talking about. And then there are other hacks, which I think Emma is probably going to be best place to talk about.
Raphael Satter: And then, most recently, there have been the files that have been disclosed by the U.S. government. These are the, these are the files that were first, or a group of files that were at first handed to some influencers. Then, it turns out the influencers were getting the same kind of files that had been already made public. Eventually, after a lot of outcry, the Department of Justice began publishing tranches of previously undiscovered files. And those have also provided a lot of information, including for some of my journalism.
Alex Urbelis: Thank you for that, Raphael. I appreciate it. I, I want to pass this next one over directly to you, Kyrie. Kyrie, you saw this data set, you saw this corpus first, really, before anybody else did. When you first went through it, what struck you the most about this? What struck you the most about the scale, the names of the people in it, the tone of the emails? What have you said to that?
Alex Urbelis: So, we’re going to wait for a second here. Okay, very good. So, Kyrie is not only a, obviously, a very talented hacker, but extremely fast typer. And Kyrie says, okay, so this is Kyrie speaking now.
Kyrie (read by Alex Urbelis): So, quote, at first, I didn’t fully grasp the scale of what I stumbled upon. There were names after names. Some of that has never been publicly linked to Epstein before. I remember this first email I found between a Harvard lawyer and him discussing how legal it is to transport minors to the island for sexual purposes, discussing it eerily casually.
Alex Urbelis: That’s creepy. That’s kind of amazing. So, obviously, that’s one of the things that struck Kyrie. I’ve passed over ahead of time some of these questions to Kyrie so that Kyrie can type these things out and get them over to us without
much delay here. But thank you for that. Now, I want to move on to our next section here, which has to deal with the different scoops here and some of the war stories from our cadre of wonderful reporters that we have here on stage. And this one, I want to pass over to you in the first instance, Raphael.
Alex Urbelis: Walk us through the story of which you are the most proud that came out of the Epstein files, whichever corpus of files they may be. Yes. And tell us a little bit about where it started, the documents you took a look at. Tell me about it. What’s your favorite story from the Epstein files that you published?
Raphael Satter: Well I don’t I don’t play favorites, but the one that I think that got a fair bit of attention was the was one that I wrote about a hack of the Epstein of Epstein related material when when a lot of it was still not public. So when the Department of Justice began publishing this material, I like probably tons of other reporters and tons of other people started kind of browsing through it. And and I I did not do it particularly quickly. This is not my beat.
Raphael Satter: I cover cybersecurity. I didn’t think that there would be much in the Epstein files that was really directly relevant to the kinds of things that I write about. But I I did find something it was a kind of curious. It was an 88 page kind of internal justification that an FBI agent had written for a data breach in which this FBI agent was being blamed for letting a hacker access the Epstein related materials. Again, I want to hesitate. I don’t want to say the Epstein files, right? Because we don’t know exactly what it was that was accessed.
Alex Urbelis: And let me pause you there for a second, too, Raphael, because you and I talked about this when you initially found it and tell us and I find this fascinating to you because this is like a little bit of a weird peek behind the scenes about how investigative reporters as minds work. And you certainly have a curious mind. Talk a little bit about what it was you found in that in the Epstein files themselves, because to my mind, what you found was like a little snippet of an iceberg. And there was this massive amount of of its body that you couldn’t see below it. But something gave you that that spidey feeling about these particular few paragraphs out of this massive data set.So what was it? Tell us about that.
Raphael Satter: So, this memo is almost 100 pages long. And then and most of it is devoted to this is an internal investigation that the FBI has mounted into this agent. Right. And this is this agent’s response to that saying to the effectively it wasn’t my fault. Procedures were improper. We’re put in an impossible position when we’re handling this kind of material. And then there’s one paragraph in which the agent says when the intrusion happened, it compromised various files, including Epstein related material. And I thought, well that’s a really interesting sentence.
Raphael Satter: The rest of it is the kind of thing that you’d see in any if there was a data breach at your organization and you were thought to be responsible and there was an internal investigation. This is exactly the kind of thing that you would write. And I thought like, gosh what kind of Epstein related materials are we talking about? And also what kind of data breach are we talking about here? For the FBI to be hacked, usually that’s fairly big news. This is the New York field office of the of the FBI. And this is the division that’s in charge of child sexual abuse, policing child sexual abuse material. So the fact that that hack even happened is kind of noteworthy.
Raphael Satter: So then I need to try to find out what took place. What’s the context? In my misfortune, one of the people that I call is Alex to try to see like, hey, do you have any ideas? You know, who should I talk to about this? And eventually, after a few phone calls, that kind of eventually it takes a few weeks. It takes a lot of phone calls. It takes a lot of doors slammed in my face. But I understand at least a little bit of what happened, which is that because the FBI’s process for handling evidence, digital evidence was so onerous, and there was just so much digital evidence to handle in in his justification, the FBI agent says that they would have had to buy thousands of hard disks every year just to handle the the overflow of data that they were handling. They were just not able to handle it in the safest way possible. And so what ended up happening is that somebody left a server misconfigured.
Raphael Satter: That server happened to be accessible from the open Internet and somebody happened to access that server. And what they did is that they go into the server and they find that it’s full of child sexual abuse material. And there’s a certain code that even if you’re a hacker and you find that kind of stuff, you alert the authorities. So this hacker gets in touch with the FBI and says, look and here I I’m paraphrasing the conversation that I wasn’t party to, but the way that it was described to me, it says that like, I don’t usually do this kind of thing, but I found a server and it’s full of child sexual abuse material. You should really look into it.
Raphael Satter: And then the FBI kind of fields this report, looks at the IP address, and then immediately it’s kind of DEFCON. What’s the worst DEFCON? The worst one. And they realize that it’s they have to tell the hackers like, so, you have to understand that this is our child sexual abuse material. And the way that it was told to me was that they actually have to like get on a very uncomfortable call. I don’t know if it was a phone call, if it was something else with the hacker and say that like, well, we appreciate your civic mindedness. However, we have the situation under control. This is, this is child sexual abuse material, which we have collected in order to prosecute people.
Raphael Satter: And, and to this day, I don’t know exactly what happened to the hacker. I was told that this is a hacker who was based abroad. I was told that this was a hacker that was more criminal minded than, say, national intelligence, state backed. But what a weird story.
Alex Urbelis: Yeah, totally, totally crazy story. Wonderful story. And thank you for reporting on it. I mean, great job, Raphael. Mikael, same question to you. What are you most proud of in terms of this corpus of data?
Mikael Thalen: Yeah, so a lot of times when you’re, I’m dealing at least with these large data sets, you kind of start with just taking shots in the dark, and you eventually develop like a system of like going through more methodically. And so I sort of thought, let’s search the word island, like that seems like an obvious search term to search for. And I found a 2014 email where, again, the former Israeli Prime Minister said, impressive island. And I thought, wow, okay, that’s great. I saw another email from that same year where he was talking about visiting the island. And he says, basically said, I’m doing everything I can. So my security detail, these two guys who are with me, don’t come with us to the island, which also seem interesting.
Mikael Thalen: But yeah, but the thing is that in 2019, when Epstein was arrested Ehud Barak came out and said, yeah, I went to the island. Yeah, I went to his house. But I was never aware of any accusations against Epstein. And so I said, okay, that’s interesting. But going through the emails, again, that’s 2019. He made that denial. And I’m not making any accusations about what he did or didn’t know. But he received an email in 2011, with from an assistant of his with two links to the Daily Mail with articles about Virginia Giuffre, who, of course, accused Epstein of abuse and of him of abuse as well. So that’s quite a few years before 2019. So the claim that he wasn’t aware of the accusations was interesting.
Mikael Thalen: Alan Dershowitz, the lawyer for Jeffrey Epstein also received an email from a New York Post writer. I believe that was around the same time saying, hey, I’m going to publish a story about the fact that Epstein was charged years prior with like soliciting a minor. And that despite that, he’s still, according to a source of his, is having young women at his New York home. And so Alan Dershowitz sent an email to Epstein saying, hey, I didn’t say anything to this reporter. And then that was forwarded to Ehud Barak. So again, the fact that he had been claiming, I don’t know anything about this. And then eight years prior was receiving links to mainstream news articles about accusations against Epstein. I thought that was pretty damning.
Alex Urbelis: Thank you for that. Appreciate it, Mikel. And Emma, let’s talk a little about DDoSecrets here in your role. So you guys don’t just host data, right? You report on it as well. So what surprised you from this data set? And is there anything in the files that you hope that somebody would dig into, but maybe they haven’t yet?
Emma Best: To me, one of the most damning things about the set of emails that were leaked directly from Epstein’s, one of his Yahoo inboxes. And there’s a lot of nasty stuff in there. But one of the most damning things is how much of a gap it reveals in terms of what the U.S. government was obligated to make public and what they didn’t. Because there are tens of thousands of emails in there that are very easy to determine, like, this falls under the scope of what was supposed to be released. And a lot of these are less explosive. You have things like his newsletters. You have things like his Amazon purchases, which, again, are still interesting, but hardly damning. And there was no reason for that not to have been made public. And we know that the government was aware of this account from court filings, and from an earlier subpoena for it.
Emma Best: And so there’s all these gaps that just should have been part of the official release. And there’s kind of a couple of reasons why there weren’t that I think are worth getting into. And the first is just failure by design, as Ryan Shapiro called it, the where and people who are used to dealing with the Freedom of Information Act will be very aware of this. Government agencies are legitimately terrible at releasing information. And yes, there you get instances where this is bad faith, but it’s also just they are terrible at it. They don’t they don’t know how to efficiently do searches. The systems aren’t designed that way. They understaff those departments.
Emma Best: One of the things with the Epstein files that we saw was like, oh, 1000 FBI agents were assigned to work on this stuff because they didn’t have staff to do it. And all of those people were under trained. So you definitely had that. You also have the fact that there was a lot of motivation to either protect people or go after people. There’s so much politicization that the sitting regime did obvious things to try to protect Trump and stop his name from from appearing, including like redacting the word don’t in some instances because it matched Don T. And there’s also a very strong desire for them to also go after their perceived political opponents. And then the Democrats have their own interests in protecting Clinton and going after the Republicans.
Emma Best: So there’s just a lot that that was never released or never even prepared or looked at. Even now they’re like, oh, well, there’s at least a million more pages that we we haven’t touched on. It’s a damning indictment of how even when there is essentially unlimited resources for it, the most clear public interest, not just national public interest, but international public interest that we’ve seen in decades, and they still can’t or won’t do it. And that by itself deserves a lot of scrutiny, even just separate from the sensationalism, the justified sensationalism of the Epstein emails and what we collectively refer to as the Epstein files.
Alex Urbelis: Yeah, very, very well put there. Thank you. I want to turn this next one over to you, Kyrie, because you have watched these journalists turn the data set essentially into various stories. So are there any stories that surprised you? And is there any information that you found in the files that you hoped that somebody would report about? Now let’s wait for Kyrie to type very quickly here. Okay. So from from Kyrie, quote, and now remember, I’m reading this for the first time.
Kyrie (read by Alex Urbelis): So quote, I actually never noticed all the Amazon purchases. I remember just seeing one purchase for a, quote, schoolgirl cosplay outfit,
close quote.
Alex Urbelis: That’s creepy. Jesus, that’s my own commentary, by the way.
Kyrie (read by Alex Urbelis): So when journalists published his book purchases, it was news to me. Filtering out the Epstein email was very hard as there were a lot of spam emails. Right now, ever since it’s been sent to DDoSecrets, I think journalists have went beyond my expectations. So at the moment, there’s not really anything, any specific things I would want journalists to dig into.
Alex Urbelis: Okay. All right. Fantastic. Thank you for that, Kyrie. Now, I want to just open this up for the panel really quickly, kind of on the same notes here and just very quickly address this. But to your minds, is there anything that you chased that you couldn’t quite get over the the finish line? Either your editors pushed back on it or it just wasn’t enough there to to to finalize the story? So were there stories that you were chasing that you just couldn’t get out? Is there anything that you can disclose about that process?
Raphael Satter: I’d love to know who the hacker was that that compromised those files in the beginning. There’s a chance that they have had all of this information well before the American public. There’s a chance they’re sitting here, too. Talk to me later. Possibly.
Alex Urbelis: Mikael?
Mikael Thalen: Yeah, there was a mention of a dinner in the emails with some notable figures in a European country. And one of the people that supposedly was invited was the former prime minister of that country. And I hadn’t seen any other public reporting on any sort of connection between Epstein and that person. So I sort of dug around but wasn’t able to find anything. And I don’t know if the dinner happened and if that person showed up to the dinner. But that would be interesting to know.
Alex Urbelis: Yeah. Anything from you, Emma, on that one?
Emma Best: Yeah, there there was one person of particular interest to me who appeared in some of the Epstein files. He was the eugenicist founder of the so-called Free Speech Union, which is a really shitty organization with ties to the Thiel Network. Some of its operations are backed by Elon Musk financially. Byline Times has done some great reporting on this. But the founder appears several times in the the files and each of the appearances are fairly innocuous. But he contradicts himself on him knowing the the Epstein social circle. Years before, it came out that his name was in the address book and he said, I don’t know how that would have happened. And then it turns out that, oh, there were all these all these connections between him and Maxwell. And that even more than that, he had had financial dealings with her father and almost like been bankrupted until he was killed suddenly.
Emma Best: So that this idea that these people didn’t know each other and had no idea who they were. They just appeared in all these photographs together. And they’re they’re in some of these emails and someone with the same name had financial dealings with Epstein. And I was never able to determine if that was actually the same person or not. And one reason this was of particular interest to me was the organization sent DDoSecrets a bunch of legal threats after we republished their their redacted donor data. They were very, very mad. And so, yeah, I did. I did a lot of extra looking into them. And it was one of those things where you can tell that there’s more. Again, the gaps are evident in the emails because it’s just very clear. You look at it, and it’s like there you can see the hole from it. But yeah, I couldn’t I couldn’t find what I needed. And maybe maybe in the next batch if the DOJ ever does it.
Alex Urbelis: Yeah. Well, we’ll get to that. And it sounds like you’ve given us some some good homework assignments here to look into as well. And and if you are the hacker that stole the FBI’s own child pornography, you can talk to Raphael right after the presentation, you know where to get them. So I want to move on now and go back again to Kyrie, because I think we’re so incredibly lucky to have Kyrie here. And I want to ask you, Kyrie, without getting into anything too sensitive and operational, when did you first realize what it was you had and what went through your mind? And what made you think that DDoSecrets was the right home for this particularly incredibly sensitive data set rather than some kind of mainstream outlet or a document dump or frankly nothing at all? Over to you, Kyrie. So we’ll wait for Kyrie to type up something extremely quickly. You know how quickly hackers type. Have you ever seen that NCIS? You know, two two hackers, one thing. What the hell was that? Two keyboards. I can’t remember what it was. So idiotic. Two idiots, one keyboard. That’s what it was. Yeah. Okay. So we have Kyrie.
Kyrie (read by Alex Urbelis): Okay. Kyrie says, I had one thing in my mind that I’m probably going to get killed. Ever since 2023, we have treaded very lightly with the emails and only coming to light in 2026, right when everything related to Epstein was uncovered. I was also referred to DDoSecrets via a friend and the cause for the project and the professionalism of Emma Best convinced me to go public with it.
Alex Urbelis: Wow. Well, thank you, Emma. And thank you, Kyrie.
Emma Best: I actually didn’t know that. So that’s cool to hear.
Alex Urbelis: That’s very moving stuff. I mean, and the fact that this is Kyrie saying, I thought I let me read that again. I had one thing in my mind that I’m probably going to get killed. And still, you did that. Thank you. That’s pretty incredible. So Kyrie, going back to you again, sources in cases like this very much stay silent forever. You’re with us in one form or another on stage at Hope. Why speak publicly about this? You just said you thought you’re going to get killed. And what’s the cost for doing so? So again, very quickly typing here.
Kyrie (read by Alex Urbelis): So Kyrie says, haha, not really, quote unquote, publicly that much. So I’m a bit comfortable. But this decision cost us a lot of freedom and sleepless nights, not knowing what would happen next. At first, we tried posting the emails for sale on forums. But obviously, we were met with a lot of doubt. So in the end, we decided it’s best just to give them to good hands. Financially, we were ruined, relocating ourselves and our families.
Alex Urbelis: That’s pretty extraordinary cost to get this type of data. That is obviously squarely in the public interest out into the hands of the people who needed to do the reporting of it. So once again, thank you for that, Kyrie. Very much appreciate it. I want to move on now to the next section here, which is a little bit more DDoSecrets focused. So, Emma, I want you to walk through us from DDoSecrets’s perspective. What happens when you get a data set of this magnitude? How do you verify the data? How do you decide what gets published as opposed to what gets restricted specifically only to journalists? Because that’s something that you do as well.
Emma Best: So there’s a couple of different parts to the story, I suppose. Initially, we got the Ehud Barak emails from Handala. They had published them openly and we we mirrored them internally and made them searchable. And the initial thought [based on previous releases] was that, oh, there’s not really a lot of value in there. So we made it like available any journalists who were verified and had access to our general Hunter system would be able to see it and search it. And it wasn’t until a reporter from Trans News Network, very, very good organization, definitely recommend them. Mady Castigan, she found it. She found in the Ehud Barak emails references to Thiel and Epstein and she mentioned it and we immediately went, oh, shit. Okay. And we went ahead to go to make them more fully public.
Emma Best: And we said, like, obviously now the the public interest vastly out outweighs like the concerns of this being from a group that we’re pretty sure is state sponsored. You know, and that’s one of the things we make clear on the the website. And I think that that was one of the big things that started getting more coverage to it and made us like feel willing to reach out to people. And I remember posting on online kind of a throwaway joke like, oh, Epstein sources, if you’re if you’re out there get in touch, like a play on the Trump 2016 thing. And I never thought anything would come of it. And I still I’m not sure if that post had anything to actually do with it or not. But it was just a few days later that the source reached out.
Emma Best: Once we had that, a big part of the verification was made a lot easier by the folks at Bloomberg who had several months before received a near identical cache of emails, same inbox. Theirs had a few more emails than ours did, like it was exported a little bit later, we think, well after Epstein died. So no real content was missing. But they had already done so much legwork and verifying that that that really made it a lot easier for us, especially since we took that we made the decision that like we can’t just dump this online. We prepared an insurance version there was a four and a half gigabyte encrypted file that we spread around just in case because it is the Epstein files. It’s hard not to be spooked.
Emma Best: We said we don’t know everyone in here who’s a victim. We can’t tell that [from the emails]. And so that was one of the things that we we kind of made as a condition for people when we gave them access to it. We restricted this more closely than a lot of our other special access data sets. But we said, if you’re not able to to verify more or less that someone is not a victim, you don’t publish their name. You don’t publish the email or any identifying information. You redact that stuff unless they are not a victim. If you can reasonably determine that like these Harvard professors and the lawyers and stuff and big public figures and people that are obviously just creeps or business associates. That’s all free game. But there’s so many references to people, especially just first name references where it’s like, OK, I don’t know who for instance, Alice, I don’t know who Alice is supposed to be. I don’t know which Alice that is. I don’t know if they were, trafficked or harassed or what happened.
Emma Best: So we really kind of just put down restrictions with that. And for the most part, we didn’t have any problems. Got a little bit blindsided by Jmail. Drop Site News gave it to to Jmail and they’ve been working to make some of the emails individually public alongside their reporting, which is a great, a great thing. But yeah, that was definitely a surprise.
Alex Urbelis: Yeah, I appreciate that, Emma. And thank you for your candor with respect to that. And I want to pass it back to you for a moment, Kyrie, as well. So this is an issue where you handed this over to DDoSecrets. Were you still involved in in what DDoSecrets was up to after you handed over those files? And what did you want from DDoSecrets in particular once you handed over this data set to them? So we’ll wait for a moment.
Kyrie (read by Alex Urbelis): From Kyrie, quote, I had full trust in Emma Best, so I sent the whole collection to her. She did an amazing job at censoring victims’ private information. At first, we thought about maybe filtering out a few emails to reduce the risks, but that would be hiding and concealing the truth forever. So basically, we just YOLO’d.
Alex Urbelis: Okay. All right. Fantastic. Wonderful. Okay. So really, in kind of a rapid fire succession, Emma, because I want to get to the next bits here. I wonder if you could tell us from your perspective, since you’ve had eyes on so much of this corpus, what disappeared from the DOJ side of things? Can you?
Emma Best: The biggest and most notable thing was the zip files. They they were taken down so that people were forced to individually download the PDFs and some of them that hadn’t even been linked to yet but had been already put online so that you could download them if you just went from volume 10 to volume 11 and 12. Those were also removed along with a lot of individual documents that were improperly redacted. And that’s the sort of thing that it’sa difficult decision at that point what to archive and how to how to handle it. But we went ahead and preserved everything we could, especially in those zips which notably also included some additional metadata which helped clarify what gaps there were in files and how things were organized.
Alex Urbelis: Appreciate it. Thank you. And I want to jump into something we’ve talked about a little bit about already, which is about victims and red lines. And you address this in one of your answers already. But I want to pass this one directly over to you again, Kyrie. And this is about that red lineissue again. It’s something I think that in your instance, right, you have to address this first. So to what extent did the victims factor into your decision about what to hand over? And I know there isn’t anything that you chose to hold back if that if that’s correct. Waiting one moment here. Typing a little more slowly this time.
Alex Urbelis: Well, while we wait for Kyrie to get back to us on this, anything else from you, Mikael, on kind of the fallout and red lines, public trust with respect to this? Any thoughts that you have on this?
Mikael Thalen: I mean, luckily, most of the emails weren’t sort of related to victims, per se. Again, it was mostly business dealings between Barack and Epstein. So thankfully, I didn’t have to really weigh that issue too much. But yeah, it seems like a lot of that stuff. Well, I mean it’s incredible that the stuff that DOJ released exposing victims and yeah, so I’m just glad I didn’t have to deal with that.
Alex Urbelis: But yeah, thank you for that. I will wait for Kyrie to get back to us. Hopefully, we didn’t lose Kyrie. That would be that would be bad. But I do want to move on since we’re running out of time for this panel. Oh, here we go.
Kyrie (read by Alex Urbelis): Kyrie came back and said, quote, Yes, at first, the victims were my main concern. We didn’t want to harm them and their families. So we didn’t want to just throw it to a public cash. So there was there were some considerations. And I think that leads directly, obviously, then to the professionalism of DDoSecrets and Emma, who’s with us today. So thank you both for that.
Alex Urbelis: Let’s talk a bit about the fallout here, right? So Raphael, you covered the FBI’s own 2023 breach here that involved the Epstein related files. So what does it tell us that these records kept leaking from both hackers and from government itself?
Raphael Satter: What was the most ironic thing for me is that this is the at the white heart center of the political debate, right? When when are these files going to be released? How are they going to be released? In what form are they going to be released? And Emma alluded earlier to the idea that it’s not necessarily that the government is malicious or the government can behave maliciously. It’s that oftentimes the people there simply aren’t very good at managing the data under their control. Now, Emma was talking about that in the context of FOIA. But I saw that in the context of simply keeping the data from spilling and from being taken taken up by hackers. So I think that it’s I think that it’s a tragedy for the U.S. public interest that folks like this hacker from 2023 had access to some of this material before the U.S. public did.
Raphael Satter: I think it’s a tragedy if and I don’t know whether it’s the case or not, but I think it would be a further tragedy if they had access to material that we the public still don’t have access to. As far as what the consequences will be, I don’t know. I think that there’s still there. There are still at least one lawsuit, several lawsuits working their way through the system in terms of trying to unloosen the material that the DOJ has held back. And I’m hopeful that that will yield more transparency. And if not, then, well, Emma’s here.
Alex Urbelis: And I want to jump around a little bit because we are running out of time. And if we have any opportunity to take questions from the audience, I want to make sure that that we can do that. So I want to jump into two questions. The first one is for you, Kyrie, and then the last one I’m going to have for the panel itself. So, Kyrie, knowing everything that you know now, would you do this again? And we’ll wait.
Kyrie (read by Alex Urbelis): And the answer is, quote, no. Honestly, it’s not worth all the paranoia and financial losses in the position we were in, but it’s the right thing to do for the victims and their families to let all their crimes come to light. If we were to have better circumstances, I would do it again.
Alex Urbelis: Wow. Pretty powerful stuff. Very candid, very honest. Thank you. And last one for the panel, and hopefully we can be brief and open it up to questions if we have some time. But for the hackers in this room who may someday find themselves in possession of a similarly powerful data set like the Epstein files, what do you wish, I mean, well, or what do you each wish sources would understand before they reach out to journalists?
Mikael Thalen: I mean, for me, source protection is the most important thing. And luckily when you’re dealing with hackers or probably a lot of people in this room, you probably know some of the basic steps of what to do in order to protect yourself when reaching out to a journalist. So I think that’s something that if people want to reach out taking the time to securely look into how to reach out to someone obviously not from a work email or a work computer, in order to protect yourself from sort of any retaliation from the government.
Alex Urbelis: So operational security type stuff, your understanding. Yeah. What about you, Emma? What do you wish sources understood when they’re reaching out?
Emma Best: I wish sources had a better understanding of how becoming a source often means that everything will change for you, even if your life is relatively undisturbed. As Kyrie mentions, the paranoia is always going to be there to a degree. You may always be looking over your shoulder and worried about it because who knows, even if the statute of limitations passes when dealing with Epstein collaborators and stuff, who knows when someone is going to want to try to get revenge or make an example out of you or this or that. And even to a degree, if those aren’t necessarily realistic concerns, they can be absolutely impossible to purge. So I wish people had a better understanding of that and of the limits that journalists have in terms of what we can do to help sources stay safe from a proactive stance.
Emma Best: Because we can do a lot in terms of technical solutions, in terms of trying to keep all of our information on them anonymous and making sure like, well, obviously we’re not going to testify about them or cooperate with any subpoenas. But there’s still concerns about do they need to get to a different location? Do they need financial assistance for this or that? And these are things that become very, very dangerous, legally speaking, and ethically fraught for journalists to directly engage in. If you are giving a source money or anything that is essentially a replacement for money that’s something that opens everyone up to a lot more liability and a lot more avenues for prosecution and also makes it a lot easier to find the source because you have resources going from a known point to an unknown point. You just follow the trail. And that is something that we need to better address collectively as a community and as a society, being able to provide safe and secure support for whistleblowers and hacktivists that are risking everything by by speaking up.
Alex Urbelis: Do we have any time for questions? Do we have one minute, maybe one minute? Any questions? One question over there. Fire away, sir. So much has been made of the fact that there have been no prosecutions that have been brought and that the president has said there’s really good people who need to be protected. And there’s all this reason for the redactions and things in the material that has been leaked. Are there actual names you can tell us now that haven’t been put out there that are actually incriminated that perhaps should be prosecuted? Is Peter Thiel, Tony Blair like what? Because people say there are the things here that we know are here that have been leaked. But I haven’t heard anyone actually name the names. Are there some that you know that haven’t been put out to the general public?
Emma Best: The ones that jump out to me have been reported by outlets like Bloomberg and Drop Site News. There have been several high prominent businessmen and you’ve got the instances of lawyers that are basically engaging in advice that if not outright illegal should be cause for disbarment. If you are if you are giving advice on how to engage in sex tourism with minors, [saying] if you go to point A to meet them, is that illegal? Or if they come to point B to meet you, is that illegal? What if you both go to point C? Is that illegal? That is a horrible conversation that any lawyer that gives that advice should be disbarred. And I think that there’s a general unwillingness to go after these people because so much of it people want to excuse.
Emma Best: And while we are all outraged here, rape culture is real and people in positions of power are protected because of that and because people are unwilling to say, why are we tolerating, you know, rape apologists at Harvard? Why are we why are we tolerating enablers? That’s something that we really need to engage in if there’s going to be repercussions. Because at this point, prosecutions and non prosecutions are entirely political.
Raphael Satter: Thank you for that, Emma. I’m with that. I think we’re going to have to wrap it up with this panel.
Alex Urbelis: Give it up for this wonderful panel here. For Kyrie in particular, who joined us against all odds. Raphael, Mikkel, Emma, for the wonderful work they’re doing. And great answer that illustrates, I think, that what’s legal isn’t always ethical. So thank you all again for listening. See you soon.
