On June 19, hundreds of thousands of documents hacked from 251 FBI and local police websites were leaked in an unprecedented disclosure known as “BlueLeaks.”
Since the BlueLeaks files were exposed, our reporters have been poring through the documents and uncovering one bombshell after another.
The latest stunning revelations include how police exaggerated the supposed threat of “antifa” to justify escalating violence against protesters. We also uncovered how the FBI chased nonexistent “eco-terrorists” and how police are using debunked junk science on “lie detection” in crime investigations.
These leaks are an unprecedented exposure of the internal operations of federal, state, and local law enforcement, revealing jaw-dropping incompetence, racism, and disregard for civil liberties by the heavily armed government agencies policing our lives.
German authorities, acting on behalf of the U.S. government, seized the server that was being used to distribute the BlueLeaks data, but The Intercept has its own copy, and we believe the public has a right to know the truth about how the police operate behind closed doors.
Our BlueLeaks investigation has uncovered a series of revelations about how police operate behind the scenes. But there’s likely more — much more — in this enormous trove of documents that we haven't found and reported out.
Much of what we’re finding confirms what people have suspected for years — that behind the scenes, when no one can see what’s going on, police all over the country skirt civil liberties and use procedures that are, frankly, idiotic.
But these abuses continue in part because Americans have been fed a diet of pro-police propaganda from the corporate media on TV shows like “Cops” and procedurals in which police are almost invariably presented as “good guys” and the crime is always solved by the end of the show.
To hold law enforcement agencies accountable for the killings of Black people and the routine violations of all our civil liberties, we must break through that wall of propaganda so that the public can understand the truth.
That’s why the BlueLeaks revelations caused such panic among U.S. law enforcement that they got their German counterparts to seize the server and try to shut down BlueLeaks. We won’t let that happen — but to cover this story while continuing all of our other reporting, we need your help.
Thank you,
