About

Emma Best (she/they) is a journalist, historian and transparency advocate. She’s written hundreds of articles at outlets including MuckRock, Gizmodo, Motherboard, Unicorn Riot, The Outline, and Property of the People. Before she became involved in the transparency community, worked for some companies that did analysis whose clients included the Intelligence Community, before leaving due to institutional obstruction and source safety issues, and becoming 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.

In 2020, a federal informant attempted to entrap and frame her as Phineas Fisher. In 2021 and 2022, leaders of a far-right militia were part of a stalking and harassment campaign targeting her.

Follow her on Mastodon at @Mxy@kolektiva.social or Bluesky at @emma.best. She’s also on Wikipedia.