Well then
co-founder of transparency activism organization Distributed of Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) was a dark web drug kingpin who ran the successor to the infamous Silk Road marketplace and was later convicted of child abuse imagery crimes - Thomas White, who was prosecuted for administering the Silk Road 2.0 drug marketplace and for possessing images of child sexual abuse material. He decided to reveal his involvement in DDoSecrets to 404 Media after serving a five year prison sentence
I was told, in no uncertain terms, that if I spoke out publicly against Ross Ulbricht's excessive sentence, [DDoSecrets] or anything similar, that I would spend much more time in prison," he said. "Now I can freely speak again, it is important to use it or lose it. So #FreeRoss."
https://www.404media.co/co-founder-of-ddosecrets-was-dark-web-drug-kingpin/
List of material published by Distributed Denial of Secrets
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_material_published_by_Distributed_Denial_of_Secrets
What is DDoSecrets ? Distributed Denial of Secrets
Whistleblowing organization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Denial_of_Secrets
Over 100 gigabytes of emails, chat logs, and internal documents, including contracts and financial information, documenting the history of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks between 1992 and 2024.
#Blueleaks was probably one of their biggest dumps
DDoSecrets called it the "largest published hack of American law enforcement agencies
As for White he was hosting sites
. “Unfortunately, one person who used the service decided to put a load of CSAM on there. The VPS was shut down, I didn't offer him another one after that, and like an idiot I forgot the back-ups were on my laptop because I was too busy setting up SR2 [Silk Road 2.0],”
I don't see him as a convicted Pedo - convicted partly to being stoopid regarding the CSAM images
In case you want to know more
Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) is a non-profit that specializes in publishing, archiving and analyzing leaked and hacked datasets, while protecting sources. It is the world's largest public library of previously secret information.
Are they the same as WikiLeaks ?
Like Wikileaks, DDoSecrets is cagey about the nature of its operations—always a paradox for organizations that promote transparency
Whereas WikiLeaks cultivated an anti-imperialist mystique centered on the cultish figure of Assange, DDoSecrets professes something more modest: an unvarnished commitment to providing information useful to journalists and concerned citizens
There are small similarities, no doubt, but IMO the difrence between the two are vast and very different in ways they are run and what "dumps" they do
At its best, the work of DDoSecrets reveals the limits of official transparency, of authorized government leaks and incrementalist beat reporting and FOIA requests that yield pages of useless redactions. Nowhere is this more visible than with BlueLeaks. “Reading the unredacted, hacked documents gives a very different picture than the selections you get from an open records officer,” said Brendan McQuade, author of Pacifying the Homeland, a book about the modern surveillance state
DDoSecrets attracted criticism a few years ago for publishing—and then withdrawing—an archive hacked from the infidelity dating site Ashley Madison, an experience the group said it learned from.
https://apnews.com/article/nv-state-wire-europe-technology-4c081f7c966140b4a4f8c661e0b03792
The BlueLeaks archive also included personal information, such as emails and home addresses, for roughly 700,000 law enforcement officers (though nothing has apparently come of that data dump).
Its a thin line
Sometimes the good guys have to cross that line
Freddy Martinez wondered if somehow the broken systems of democratic accountability that gave rise to DDoSecrets could be repaired. “Maybe we’ll become irrelevant, which might be nice,” he said.
Back in 2021 - the FBI prevented them from filing FOIA requests
https://emma.best/2021/06/13/fbi-tried-to-ban-me-from-foia/
“Truth has an impact, regardless of the respectability politics some people choose to engage in when it comes to the alleged sources,” Best wrote Co-Founder of DDoSecrets
DDoSecrets is adamant that it doesn’t break the law or solicit hacked material. But its members are mingling with the hacktivist underground
If the work of DDoSecrets has the whiff of the illicit, it’s because official secrecy, mass surveillance, threats of prosecution, and big tech’s cooperation with censorious authorities have impeded the ability of journalists and publishers of leaked data alike to operate.