The secret-leaking website DCLeaks went down on Thursday evening, shortly after posting documents it says were obtained by hacking a key aide to Hillary Clinton at the State Department.
The files included emails from Capricia Penavic Marshall, whose 2009-13 tenure as chief of protocol at the department overlapped with Clinton’s time as secretary of state. Documents had been grouped in categories such as “Clinton Foundation” and “Conversations with Clinton’s team.”
Marshall began working for Clinton as an assistant during Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign for the White House. The hacked emails, purportedly obtained from Marshall’s personal Gmail account, ranged from March 2015 to June 2016.
DCLeaks crashed just hours after publishing the files, with attempts to access the site on Thursday evening being met with a message informing users of an “error establishing a database connection.”
The website has published emails and documents hacked from a range of public officials and political staffers this year. Those have included liberal billionaire George Soros, former secretary of state Colin Powell, staffers to Arizona Sen. John McCain and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, and White House staffer Ian Mellul.
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The website has crashed in the past. DCLeaks also inexplicably went down for several days in August, coinciding with a suspension of its Twitter account, before both came back online.
On Tuesday, a hacker identifying as Guccifer 2.0 released documents allegedly stolen through a hack of the Clinton Foundation. Guccifer was similarly suspended from Twitter for a day-long period in August, but his account was also restored.
Cybersecurity experts point out that American intelligence services often encourage tech companies in in the United States to allow hackers to use their services, because it makes surveillance less complex. As a result, high profile political hackers have enjoyed relatively broad freedoms in navigating the Web this year.
Democrats have widely asserted that both DCLeaks and Guccifer are connected to the Russian government. While that assessment is difficult to reconcile with the fondness each appears to hold for American tech, analysts have come up with at least some technical data to corroborate the claim.
