Large Cache of Leaked Russian Documents to Be Released Friday

While Wikileaks has become both famous and infamous for their own series of leaks going back close to 13 years, there is no denying that the secretive organization, founded by Julian Assange has not been politically neutral as of late. In fact, the special counsel’s office is reportedly investigating whether Wikileaks conspired with Russia and the Trump campaign in 2016 in order to tilt the election in Donald Trumps favor.

Now, a new secretive organization has entered the picture, promising to not only be apolitical but also promising to release troves of Russian documents which Julian Assange refused to leak himself.

“A lot of what WikiLeaks will do is organize and re-publish information that’s appeared elsewhere,” Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at U.C. Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute, told the Daily Beast. “They’ve never done that with anything out of Russia”

The new site, called Distributed Denial of Secrets, playing off of the phrase ‘Distributed Denial of Service’ which is essentially a bot attack of a website to overload its servers, was co-founded by a woman named Emma Best. Best is a transparency activist and a national security journalist who wants to bring transparency to the world regardless of which nation-state may have been involved.

On Friday, Best and her new organization will release numerous archives of hacked/leaked material, most of it involving Russia.

“Stuff from politicians, journalists, bankers, folks in oligarch and religious circles, nationalists, separatists, terrorists operating in Ukraine,” Best told the Daily Beast. “Hundreds of thousands of emails, Skype and Facebook messages, along with lots of docs.”

According to the Daily Beast, the Distributed Denial of Secrets release will include a staggering 200,000 emails alone, and a total of 175 gigabytes of data. This will include files on a number of Russian figures connected to Putin and the Kremlin, including key documents related to the Kremlin’s secretive coordination with Russian separatists in Ukraine.