Emma Best (she/they) is an independent journalist and transparency advocate with a background in national security. Drawing on leaked and declassified documents, she has published hundreds of articles at outlets including MuckRock, Gizmodo, Motherboard, Unicorn Riot, The Outline, and Property of the People. In a belief that the system could be better, she previously worked for companies, some of which have been hired by U.S. counterintelligence, before leaving due to institutional obstruction and source safety issues. Distance brought more clarity, and she became further disillusioned.
She has filed nearly 14,000 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, including roughly 7,000 requests with MuckRock and another roughly 7,000 FOIA requests for the files of dead FBI agents, which the FBI threw out and considered prosecuting her over. The FBI later unsuccessfully tried to ban her from FOIA. In 2016, she successfully helped push the CIA to ‘surge their resources’ to put their CREST database of over 900,000 declassified CIA documents online, and publicly documented connections between WikiLeaks and Guccifer 2.0.
In 2018, she co-founded Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), a 501(c)(3) journalist non-profit that has published major leaks from 60 countries. After DDoSecrets published BlueLeaks, the largest set of internal documents from American law enforcement and fusion centers, Trump’s DHS made debunked claims about the group and launched a failed investigation.
Follow her on Mastodon at @[email protected], or read more about her on Wikipedia.