Donk_enby is a prolific hacktivist, best known for archiving the
social media site Parler in January 2021.
After the January 6 insurrection in Washington D.C., Donk found
a vulnerability in Parler's iOS mobile app that
allowed her to capture
more than 30 terabytes of Parler user-generated video
and metadata before it was removed by Amazon. We at DDoSecrets worked
with her to archive that data,
at the time.
Thanks to her
quick work
and
keen eye
for detail,
GPS metadata
for many of the videos was captured, which made them
useful for
journalistic work
as well as for
legal cases.
This monumental effort to archive all of Parler earned donk a lot of negative attention from the US far-right and from the Republican mainstream. She was doxxed, then lost her job, and her apartment, finally becoming homeless.
She didn't stop hacking. One month after the riot at the US Capitol, donk_enby was pulled into events on the other side of the world, in Myanmar. In February 2021 military generals staged a surprise coup and overturned a democratically elected government. Soon after, DDoSecrets received hacked data that documents the financial motivations of the coup leaders. Donk_enby worked with local activists to denounce Western company's complicity, and to find data about foreign investments in Myanmar and how they fund the military dictatorship. Donk's research has made it on to the cover of Le Monde and resulted in multinationals like TOTAL cutting ties with the coup regime. She helped groups like Justice for Myanmar track coup leaders' money in the companies registered to their children.
More than a year later, the data from donk_enby and her friends is still being used to document war crimes and crimes against humanity, in Myanmar and elsewhere.
This sort of work for the common good unfortunately doesn't pay. Donk is still essentially homeless and out of a job, and needs our help. Funds from this campaign will be used to get donk to safety in a country where she is legally allowed to work, and to pay for a few months' rent, so she can focus on her mental health.
Who am I?
Lorax B. Horne
Lorax is on the board of DDoSecrets, a 501c3 non-profit promoting free speech, corporate and government accountability by publishing large data sets in the public interest. They are a documentarian, poet and author with a forthcoming chapter about the rights of nature in the Ecuadorian constitution in Beautiful Solutions: A Toolbox for Liberation (OR Books: Winter 2022).
