Best has said that before becoming a
transparency activist and
investigative journalist, they worked for
Wikistrat and
subcontractors hired by the
Intelligence Community before becoming disillusioned. They left over concerns for source safety and bureaucratic obstruction, and have discussed disillusionment about
surveillance,
police militarization, and expansion of the military. Best said in 2020 that they had not kept in touch with old colleagues.
Activism In July 2016, Best uploaded 3,471 issues of
Time magazine from 1923 to 2014 to be freely available online. This may have violated Time's terms and conditions. Best released a statement that included a quote from the magazine's founder,
Henry R Luce: "Journalism is the art of collecting varying kinds of information (commonly called news) which a few people possess and of transmitting it to a much larger number of people who are supposed to desire to share it."
Freedom of Information Act From 2016 to 2020, Best filed more than 6,000 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, including numerous requests to U.S. intelligence services and over 1,600 with the
FBI, and published hundreds of articles. In 2016, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated and considered prosecuting Best for their use of FOIA. According to the
Calyx Institute, Best "consistently sits at or near the top of FBI's list of vexsome FOIA requesters". In 2017, Best helped get the CIA database of 13 million pages of declassified files online. That year, Best also filed a FOIA lawsuit against the FBI for their files on the
Church of Scientology. In 2019, Best and former
NSA hacker Emily Crose embarked on a project to use FOIA to get documents on historical
hacking incidents, called "Hacking History". That year, Best filed another FOIA lawsuit against the FBI for their file on the
Church Committee. In 2020, Best said they were concerned that the government was using the
COVID-19 pandemic "as an
obstructive step". In 2021, the FBI banned Best from filing FOIA requests, and their existing requests were closed. With the help of national security attorneys
Mark Zaid and Brad Moss, the ban was lifted after several months and their requests were reopened.
WikiLeaks Before DDoSecrets, Best had joined a narrow group of
WikiLeaks contributors before falling out with
Julian Assange, accusing him, among other things, of having lied about the source of the
DNC email leak, and the incomplete nature of its archive of
John Podesta's emails. Best has also published several of WikiLeaks' own leaked documents and material favorable to Assange leaked from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. On 19 July 2016, in response to the
Turkish government's purges that followed the coup attempt, WikiLeaks released 294,548 emails from Turkey's ruling
Justice and Development party (AKP). Most experts agree that
Phineas Fisher was behind the leak. On 21 July, WikiLeaks tweeted a link to a database which contained sensitive information, such as the
Turkish Identification Number, of approximately 50 million Turkish citizens. The information was not in the files uploaded by WikiLeaks, but in files described by WikiLeaks as "the full data for the Turkey AKP emails and more". Best posted these files to the
Internet Archive, who subsequently removed them when the personal data was discovered. In mid-August 2016,
Guccifer 2.0 expressed interest in offering a
trove of Democratic e-mails to Best. Best tried to negotiate the hosting of the stolen emails and documents on the Internet Archive. Assange urged Best to decline, intimating that he was in contact with the persona's handlers, and that the material would have greater impact if he released it first. The conversation ended with "Guccifer 2.0" saying they would send the material directly to WikiLeaks. After Best published private WikiLeaks chats in July 2018, Assange's personal
Twitter account cited their transgender status and dismissed them as a disgruntled activist. Assange's account was locked until the tweet was deleted for violating Twitter rules. In January 2019, they made a cache of Russian documents available to WikiLeaks before
Distributed Denial of Secrets published them. In July 2022, Best was the first to discover that WikiLeaks had launched a new submission portal after being offline for months. The system did not work and then shut down completely.
Distributed Denial of Secrets On December 3, 2018, Best co-founded
Distributed Denial of Secrets with another member of the group known as The Architect. Best's work at WikiLeaks laid the foundation for the group to come together. According to Best, The Architect, whom they already knew, approached them and expressed their desire to see a new platform for leaked and hacked materials, along with other relevant datasets. In 2024, it was revealed that The Architect was
Thomas White. In July 2020, three agents who identified themselves as part of
Homeland Security Investigations visited a woman in Boston to question her about
BlueLeaks, Distributed Denial of Secrets and Emma Best. The agents asked the woman about her involvement with BlueLeaks before eventually asking her to become an informant, and offered to pay for any information that led to arrests. In February 2021, Distributed Denial of Secrets leaked 70
gigabytes of data from the
far right social media platform
Gab, including email addresses, passwords, and internal emails; the group referred to the action as "GabLeaks". In 2022, Best and Distributed Denial of Secrets joined in the
information war being
fought by Russia and Ukraine by publishing lots of information leaked from inside Russia. == Commentary and beliefs ==