We’re Drowning in Hacked and Leaked Datasets and Barely Anyone is Looking Through Them

New hacked and leaked datasets get dumped on the internet every day, and barely anyone looks through them to uncover crimes and corruption. The problem is that most people have no idea how to even get started. I’m hoping to change that.

I’ve spent the last two years writing a book to teach the skills required to investigate hacked and leaked data. Along with lessons on coding and technical tools, I’ve incorporated many anecdotes and firsthand tips from the trenches of investigative journalism. If you follow along with the book, in a series of hands-on projects, you’ll work with real datasets, including those from police departments, fascist groups, militias, a Russian ransomware gang, and social networks.

My book, “Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations: The Art of Analyzing Hacked and Leaked Data,” doesn’t assume any prior knowledge. All you need to get started is a computer, an internet connection, and some free disk space for datasets.

You can find it for free here — and if you just want to read the kind of journalism that working with datasets makes possible, below is a selection of my reporting for The Intercept over the last decade.

Thank you,
Micah Lee

Director of Information Security

Data Journalism From Micah Lee

A month after Hamas’s brutal October 2023 attack on Israel and Israel’s genocidal response, the ADL published an interactive map showing a massive uptick in “antisemitic incidents and anti-Israel rallies” in the U.S. since the war broke out. After extracting and analyzing the data from the map, I discovered that a large portion of the protests that ADL framed as “antisemitic” were actually organized by American Jews, including rabbis and children of Holocaust survivors, protesting genocide.
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After Russia illegally invaded Ukraine in 2022, dozens of Russian organizations — including government agencies, oil and gas companies, and financial institutions — were hacked, with terabytes of stolen data leaked onto the internet.
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During the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising, hundreds of law enforcement websites were hacked. The BlueLeaks archive contains over 16 million rows of data, including emails, descriptions of alleged crimes, and detailed personal information.
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A year and a half into the Covid-19 pandemic, I received hacked data about the anti-vax group America’s Frontline Doctors. The data revealed that 72,000 people paid at least $6.7 million (but probably much more) for fake health care promoted by vaccine conspiracist and January 6 insurrectionist Simone Gold. This reporting led to a congressional investigation into the pandemic profiteers.
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From 2016 through 2019, I led an ambitious project at The Intercept to comprehensively, and responsibly, report on documents from the NSA Signals Intelligence Directorate’s internal classified blog called SIDtoday. We published and reported on over 2,000 Snowden documents, by far more than any other newsroom with access to the archive.
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