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 proceeded to throw out and appears to have considered prosecuting her over. The FBI later unsuccessfully tried to ban her from FOIA.
In 2018, she co-founded Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), a 501(c)(3) journalist non-profit that as of 2023 has published major leaks from over 55 countries. You can read more about DDoSecrets on Wikipedia or about debunked claims about us first made by Trump’s DHS after DDoSecrets published BlueLeaks, the largest set of internal documents from American law enforcement and fusion centers.
She has previously dealt with WikiLeaks (example), and publicly documented and criticized specific people or actions regardless of affiliations or events that have been going on in their orbits at the time. Regardless, she believes that no one deserves the BOP, including Julian Assange.
Follow her on Mastodon at @[email protected], or read more about her on Wikipedia.