'This Time It's Russia's Emails Getting Leaked'

'Russian oligarchs and Kremlin apparatchiks may find the tables turned on them,' writes Kevin Poulsen at The Daily Beast, reporting on a new leak site that's unleashed 'a compilation of hundreds of thousands of hacked emails and gigabytes of leaked documents.'
'Think of it as WikiLeaks, but without Julian Assange's aversion to posting Russian secrets.' Slashdot reader hyades1 shared their report:

The site, Distributed Denial of Secrets, was founded last month by transparency activists. Co-founder Emma Best said the Russian leaks, slated for release Friday, will bring into one place dozens of different archives of hacked material that, at best, have been difficult to locate, and in some cases appear to have disappeared entirely from the web. 'Stuff from politicians, journalists, bankers, folks in oligarch and religious circles, nationalists, separatists, terrorists operating in Ukraine,' said Best, a national-security journalist and transparency activist. 'Hundreds of thousands of emails, Skype and Facebook messages, along with lots of docs....'
The site is a kind of academic library or a museum for leak scholars, housing such diverse artifacts as the files North Korea stole from Sony in 2014, and a leak from the Special State Protection Service of Azerbaijan.

The site's Russia section already includes a leak from Russia's Ministry of the Interior, portions of which detailed the deployment of Russian troops to Ukraine at a time when the Kremlin was denying a military presence there. Though some material from that leak was published in 2014, about half of it wasn't, and WikiLeaks reportedly rejected a request to host the files two years later, at a time when Julian Assange was focused on exposing Democratic Party documents passed to WikiLeaks by Kremlin hackers. 'A lot of what WikiLeaks will do is organize and re-publish information that's appeared elsewhere,' said Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute. 'They've never done that with anything out of Russia.'

The Russian documents were posted simultaneously on the DDoSecrets website and on the Internet Archive, notes the New York Times, adding that the new site has also posted a large archive of internal documents from WikiLeaks itself.
'Personally, I am disappointed by what I see as dishonest and egotistic behavior from Julian Assange and WikiLeaks,' Best tells the Times. 'But she added that she had made the Russian document collection available to WikiLeaks ahead of its public release on Friday, and had posted material favorable to Mr. Assange leaked from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has lived for more than six years to avoid arrest.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.