On June 19, 2020, Distributed Denial of Secrets published 269.21 gigabytes of internal intelligence bulletins, emails, reports, and financial records stolen from Netsential, a web developer serving fusion centers and law-enforcement agencies. The collection covered material produced from August 1996 through June 2020 by more than 200 agencies and contained over one million documents. National Fusion Center Association officials confirmed the data’s authenticity, while warning that the exposure could put officers and other individuals at risk. The federal investigation later led to rejected Freedom of Information Act requests and questioning by Homeland Security Investigations, including inquiries involving DDoSecrets co-founder Emma Best.
The disclosure also exposed the privacy risks and weak oversight surrounding fusion centers, which expanded after the September 11 attacks to pool intelligence from federal, state, and local agencies. Leaked records described monitoring of protesters and political groups, including people involved in Black Lives Matter demonstrations, along with access to social-media data and automatic license-plate-reader information. In Maine, documents indicated that the Maine Information and Analysis Center retained information about people who had legally protested or had appeared suspicious without committing crimes. Earlier oversight had already found serious performance problems: a 2012 Senate investigation reported that none of 386 reviewed unclassified fusion-center reports contributed to identifying or preventing a terrorist plot, and that three-quarters had no connection to terrorism.
