BlueLeaks, sometimes referred to by the Twitter hashtag #BlueLeaks, refers to 269.21 gibibytes of internal U.S. law enforcement data obtained by the hacker collective Anonymous and released on June 19, 2020, by the activist group Distributed Denial of Secrets, which called it the "largest published hack of American law enforcement agencies".
[1] The data — internal intelligence, bulletins, emails, and reports — was produced between August 1996 and June 2020[2] by more than 200 law enforcement agencies, which provided it to fusion centers.
National Fusion Center Association (NFCA) officials confirmed the authenticity of the data, according to documents obtained by security journalist Brian Krebs; the organization warned its members that hackers may use the leaked information to target them.
[8] After the murder of George Floyd and other instances of police violence in 2020, law enforcement in the United States came under renewed scrutiny.
In 2011, Antisec, a subgroup of Anonymous, released law enforcement information in support of Occupy Wall Street protestors, but the collective had few significant operations within the United States since then.
[10] Some of the documents contain material related to the attitudes of law enforcement and their response to the Black Lives Matter movement, George Floyd protests, and COVID-19 pandemic.
They show details about the data that police can obtain from social media sites including Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Reddit and Tumblr, among others.
The leaks showed the fusion center was spying on and keeping records on people who had been legally protesting or had been "suspicious" but committed no crime.
The group focused on voluntarily forwarding detailed information of Google, YouTube, and Gmail users, among other products, to members of the Northern California Regional Intelligence, a counter-terrorist fusion center, for content threatening violence or otherwise expressing extremist views, often associated with the far right.
[18] One way Google identified its users in order to report them to law enforcement was by cross-referencing different Gmail accounts, which eventually led them to a single Android phone.
Various Freedom of Information Act requests filed about BlueLeaks and DDoSecrets were rejected due to an ongoing federal investigation.