Emma Best is an American investigative reporter who rose to prominence as a result of her work for Wikileaks and activist Julian Assange.
Emma Best is well-known for filing numerous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests on behalf of MuckRock, as well as co-founding the whistleblower website Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), which led to Best being investigated by the Department of Homeland Security and temporarily barred from filing FOIA requests.
Best co-founded Distributed Denial of Secrets with another member of The Architect’s group.
Before DDoSecrets, Best was a member of a small group of Wikileaks contributors before criticising Julian Assange for, among other things, lying about the source of the DNC email leak and the incomplete nature of its archive of John Podesta’s emails. Best has published a number of documents obtained from Wikileaks.
Wikileaks published 294,548 emails from Turkey’s ruling party on July 19, 2016, in response to the Turkish government’s purges. The leak was most likely caused by Phineas Fisher, according to most experts. Guccifer 2.0 expressed interest in offering a trove of Democratic e-mails to Wikileaks in mid-August 2016. Assange urged Best to decline, claiming that releasing the material first would have a greater impact.
Best has filed over 5,000 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests since 2016, including numerous requests to US intelligence services and over 1,600 with the FBI, as well as hundreds of articles.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated and considered prosecuting Best for their use of FOIA in 2016.
Best was instrumental in bringing the CIA database of 13 million pages of declassified files online in 2017.
In 2019, Best and former NSA hacker Emily Crose launched “Hacking History,” a project that uses FOIA to obtain documents on historical hacking incidents.
