Announcement: Institute for Quantitative Social Science and DDoSecrets

Harvard University's social science research center has a SecureDrop, and has appointed a DDoSecrets member as a graduate affiliate

DDoSecrets exists to bring relevant data to the public. We are always looking for groups that are publishing with meaningful commitments to public access. Having benefited from an earlier ad hoc arrangement with an academic entity, we looked for a group that could foresee mutual benefit to working longer term with the datasets we have published.

We are pleased to announce that Milo Trujillo, DDoSecrets member and PhD candidate in Complex Systems and Data Science at the University of Vermont, has been appointed by Harvard University’s Institute of Quantitative Social Science as a graduate student affiliate.

The IQSS is unique in the academic world for possessing a SecureDrop, which we can now recommend to our sources for the transfer of a specific category of data. Data received by the IQSS SecureDrop will be processed according to their protocols, as defined by the research group the SilverLining Project: Finding Social Good in Clouds on the Dark Web. The IQSS follows stringent procedures for protecting individual privacy, and so data that is received via their secure dropbox will make it to DDoSecrets members after their processing.

We believe this affiliation will boost the collective’s ability to create public good parting from our data. IQSS does not replace our relationship with media and journalism, practices which often will require the personal information in a dataset in order to verify and fact-check its contents.

We hope the addition of social scientists to the community will act as a complement and a support for the work of journalists who mine our data for news stories.