Limited Distribution: Metropolitan PD

In the ransomware category, we are listing data Babuk released from the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington D.C., including 92,564 emails

Babuk posted screenshots of the ransom negotiations to their website. The police negotiator’s messages are in black. A full transcript of the exchange was produced by Emma Best

The leak from the Metropolitan Police Department (#MPDLeaks) of D.C. totals 250 gigabytes, uploaded progressively by ransomware group Babuk to their .onion site. Distributed Denial of Secrets is retrieving this data as it becomes available, and getting it to the researchers who have requested access to our limited distribution datasets.

Emma Best spoke to Gizmodo about the publication:

“We’ve been given a unique opportunity to examine how these systems of policing are built, how they’re deployed, and an opportunity to perform an authoritative study on how, when and why the system is deployed differently against different groups. While some have expressed dismay at some of the documents’ contents or their origins, the reality is we find ourselves presented with data we don’t have the privilege of ignoring. (The data gives) an unprecedented look at police monitoring not just of rightwing movements but of various other groups that have been classified as ‘gangs.’”

In addition to the limited distribution portion of this dataset, we are assembling torrents for some of the email inboxes that we converted from .pst to .eml. The first public torrent includes 74,874 emails from the inbox of the lead civilian analyst for the department’s Intelligence Branch. A torrent of the 17,690 emails from the Director of Human Resources is available upon request.

Early research into this data has shown that Washington’s Trump Hotel raised its rates “as a security tactic” to deter QAnon believers from staying in early March. Forbes had originally reported the surge pricing at the Trump hotel in February, and emails The Guardian reviewed from #MPDLeaks finally revealed the intention behind this tactic. Al Jazeera also wrote about the dataset, with the conclusion: “It’s not talking about white supremacists and I really think that that lays bare the bias that MPD has directed at people exercising their First Amendment rights.” The union representing the police officers whose personnel records leaked filed a class grievance with the city for losing control of their data.