INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE:

The importance of the information in the Epik hack--if it proves to be accurate--seems obvious, especially for researchers tracking QAnon groups or other disinformation sources, hate-speech advocates, and domestic extremists. "The company played such a major role in keeping far-right terrorist cesspools alive," Rita Katz, executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, which studies online extremism, told the Washington Post. "Without Epik, many extremist communities--from QAnon and white nationalists to accelerationist neo-Nazis--would have had far less oxygen to spread harm, whether that be building toward the January 6 Capitol riots or sowing the misinformation and conspiracy theories chipping away at democracy."

Emma Best, co-founder of Distributed Denial of Secrets, a journalism nonprofit that specializes in leaked data, told the Post that some researchers have called the Epik hack "the Panama Papers of hate groups," a comparison to the leak of more than 11 million documents that exposed the offshore finance industry, and earned the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists a Pulitzer. Megan Squire, a professor at Elon University who studies right-wing extremism, told the Post "It's massive. It may be the biggest domain-style leak I've seen and, as an extremism researcher, it's certainly the most interesting. It's an embarrassment of riches." 

Like the Panama Papers, getting information out of the huge database and making sense of it is time-consuming, which may explain why coverage of the Epik hack lagged; some outlets published their first stories more than one week after Monacelli's tweet. So far, most reports on the Epik hack have been explainers, recapping the data breach and then bringing in commentary on the potential value of the leaked materials from cybersecurity experts and extremism scholars. Gizmodo, in its report, noted that it had "downloaded copies of the Epik data and will be assessing its content." 

Tweet   @brothersjudd