Emma Best (she/they) is an independent journalist and transparency activist with a background in national security. Drawing on leaked and declassified documents, she writes about the history of the Intelligence Community and has published hundreds of articles at MuckRock, as well as outlets like Gizmodo, Motherboard, Unicorn Riot, The Outline, and Property of the People.
She has filed nearly 7,000 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with MuckRock, in addition to roughly 7,000 FOIA requests she submitted 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 documents online.
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.
She has previously dealt with WikiLeaks (example), publicly documenting and criticizing various people or actions. Regardless, she believes that no one deserves the BOP, including Julian Assange.
Follow her on Mastodon at @[email protected], or read about her on Wikipedia.