The secret of BlueLeaks: security, police, and the continuum of pacification

Brendan McQuade, Lorax B. Horne, Zach Wehrwein and Milo Z. Trujillo

Small Wars and Insurgencies, 2022, vol. 33, issue 4-5, 693-719

Abstract: This paper reveals the secrets of BlueLeaks, a massive archive of documents hacked from police agencies, and intelligence centers in the United States. A September 2019 Intelligence Assessment by the Virginia Fusion Center cites counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen to evaluate the ‘insurgency tactics and strategies’ of environmentalists. What is remarkable about the document is not the domestic application of counterinsurgency but how it reveals the biases of security. Read from an anti-security perspective, this document becomes a cipher to decode the political content of the BlueLeaks archive that is obscured by the deep acceptance of ‘security’ as an apolitical, unqualified social good. The analysis is grounded in document and network analysis of BlueLeaks documents from the New England region. It finds that practices commonly understood as ‘counterinsurgency’ span and animate the continuum of pacification. The secret of BlueLeaks is the secret of security: a ceaseless low-intensity class war that envelops and encompasses the continuum of pacification, protects property, administers poverty, depoliticizes social harms, and elicits participation in pacification.

Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1080/09592318.2021.2001409

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