Twitter Terminates DDoSecrets, Falsely Claims it May Infect Visitors

[jayfish]

Source: Ars Technica

DDoSecrets describes itself as a “transparency collective, aimed at enabling the free transmission of data in the public interest.” On Friday, it published BlueLeaks, a 269-gigabyte trove of documents that KrebsOnSecurity reported was obtained through the hack of a Web development company that hosted documents on behalf of police departments. Some of the documents exposed police candidly discussing responses to demonstrations protesting what a Minnesota district attorney has charged was the murder of George Floyd, a Black man who died while handcuffed as a Minneapolis Police Department officer pressed a knee on his neck for nearly nine minutes. As of Tuesday, Derek Chauvin, who has since been fired, had not entered a plea.

A Twitter spokesperson confirmed that the company had permanently suspended the DDoSecrets account for violating the social media site’s rules barring hacked materials. The spokesperson said the material (1) contained unredacted information that could put people at risk of real-world harm and (2) ran afoul of a policy that forbids the distribution of material that is obtained through technical breaches and hacks, as publishers of DDoSecrets claimed had been done.

DDoSecrets co-founder Emma Best criticized the suspension and noted that the Twitter account for WikiLeaks remains active despite its publishing of vast troves of private information resulting from the 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee and members of the Hillary Clinton campaign. WikiLeaks has also tweeted links to its Vault 7 series, which published details about closely guarded CIA hacking programs.

Other accounts associated with the Anonymous hacking movement have also escaped suspensions. Twitter was also slow to suspend Guccifer 2.0 and the Dark Overlord, the monikers of two purported hackers, both of whom also published extensive amounts of personal information obtained through hacking and tweeted the links.

Read more: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/twitter-terminates-ddosecrets-and-falsely-claims-it-may-infect-visitors/

[canuckledragger]

1. Sounds like a selective enforcement policy

I dealt with that crap at work at a while back, where my incompetent asshole boss would enforce the rules only against those he didn't like. (usually trying to frame them), letting other rule breakers he DID like get away with whatever they want.

He was fired about a year or 2 later, good riddance.