Truth & Transparency Foundation

Videos were posted to the YouTube channel Mormon Leaks on the last day of the October 2016 LDS General Conference.[1][2]

Ryan McKnight, the site's founder, had previously gained attention in October 2016 when he was interviewed by The New York Times about his YouTube channel Mormon Leaks, which released videos of top LDS leadership executive discussions.[3][4] McKnight is a former Mormon, having resigned from the LDS Church in 2014,[4][5] residing in Las Vegas, Nevada.[6][7] The anonymous individual who sent him the videos via email, according to McKnight, had been holding onto them for a period of years but with the intention to do something with them eventually.[8][9] Within a time span of under a month the YouTube channel had garnered 2,200 followers.[10]

The LDS Church did not publicly question the veracity of the videos,[6] which included top leadership debating the "homosexual agenda".[11] Additional topics discussed by the high-level LDS Church leadership in the videos included marijuana, Islam, the subprime mortgage crisis, and a debate over the sexual orientation of Chelsea Manning.[2][1][12] LDS Church spokesman Eric Hawkins provided an official response, which stated: "In these committee meetings, presentations are routinely received from various religious, political and subject matter experts on various topics. The purpose is to understand issues that may face the Church, and is in pursuit of the obligation Church leaders feel to be informed on and have open discussion about current issues. This is an informational forum, not a decision-making body."[2][13][14] Hawkins pointed out the videos were from a timeframe of 2007 through 2012.[2][13][14]

In total the 15 videos were published to YouTube on the last day of the October 2016 LDS General Conference.[1][2][13] Most of the videos were from closed session events only attended by high-level LDS Church leadership.[13] The majority of them depicted lectures given to the Quorum of the Twelve, the second-highest ranking leadership group within the LDS Church.[1] Mike Leavitt, former governor of Utah, appeared in a video filmed in 2012 and gave a presentation on State Religious Freedom Restoration Acts.[1] Gordon H. Smith, former U.S. senator from Oregon, was shown in another video talking to the LDS Church leadership.[15][16] Smith lectured the LDS Church leaders about the "inestimable power" yielded from being able to contact U.S. Senators whenever necessary for assistance.[15] The lectures given to LDS Church leadership in this fashion were businesslike, with statistics and Microsoft PowerPoint presentations.[17]

McKnight suddenly found himself the point-person on the Internet for those wishing to maintain anonymity and yet simultaneously publicize secret documents from the LDS Church.[18] After the videos engendered debate and attention from Mormons and the wider Internet community, McKnight was asked to add more videos from people who messaged him on Reddit.[19][3] After another anonymous user on Reddit asked him, he publicized documents from the LDS Church detailing a rules modification about homosexual partners.[5] Reddit users asked him for a more secure means of submitting documents about the LDS Church.[20]

TTF uses Tor privacy browser and secure communication SecureDrop to protect confidentiality.[10][8]

McKnight decided to found TTF so whistleblowers could protect their anonymity.[19] Since his increased attention from the October videos and the November policy change leaks, McKnight has been contacted by 25 sources inside and outside of the LDS Church with potential material to release.[5] McKnight and his team spent six months planning creation of the organization.[5] He estimated approximately a potential for between hundreds to thousands of additional individuals who may wish to leak information through the site.[8] The organization has no affiliation with Fred Karger or his website MormonTips.com, which also publicizes confidential documents from the LDS Church.[5] MormonLeaks takes steps to protect confidentiality of their sources, including erasing all IP addresses from submissions and removing watermarks from submitted materials.[5] The site asks users who wish to submit secret documents to use the Tor privacy browser to protect themselves.[10] Users then send the documents to TTF via SecureDrop.[8] Encryption methods are further incorporated to mask the identity of the whistleblowers.[18] The motivation behind the organization is to increase transparency of LDS Church leadership.[21][22]

The TTF website (then "MormonLeaks") launched on December 19, 2016.[19][5][20] The organization was started with a website and accompanying Twitter page.[19] The TTF team works to verify documents before posting them live.[6][5] This fact-checking team includes five volunteers and an attorney.[7] MormonLeaks does not take funding through advertising.[6] Funds to start TTF itself were initially raised through donations from GoFundMe.[5][7] The hope of its founder was that TTF would demonstrate the LDS Church's profitable nature as a business as opposed to its assertion of religious status.[6] The founder said it was highly unlikely the LDS Church would voluntarily publicize more of its innermost proceedings, saying it "will never be voluntarily transparent, they have nothing to gain from it".[5] The site's intention was to avoid publishing specific lists of names of membership, and instead focus on economic information and internal organization policies and procedures.[23][22] The site intended to limit disclosure of actual people's names to high-ranking officials including the Quorum of the Twelve and the First Presidency.[23][24]

The organization's first leaks appeared on December 19, 2016, in the form of LDS Church documents from 2010.[7][10] It published four files onto its account on Facebook as of December 20, 2016.[23] The first documents publicized by TTF included memos about legal procedures, a letter to the temple department's executive director regarding unsanctioned materials on the Internet, and an organizational chart for the intellectual property division of the LDS Church.[24] TTF asserts to have been offered documents from two separate individuals who were employees of the LDS Church concerning tithing information of famous Mormons, including American football quarterback Steve Young.[24]

After TTF (then "MormonLeaks") had posted a handful a number of LDS Church documents for four months, the Church sent a cease-and-desist letter alleging copyright infringement with regard to a leaked Church leadership PowerPoint presentation published by TTF in February 2017. The PowerPoint discussed societal pressures that the Church felt had led some LDS members to apostasy, which included pornography, the issues agitated for by Ordain Women, and questions regarding Mormon history such as those promoted in books by lawyer / Fundamentalist Mormon Denver Snuffer or in online postings by psychologist social critic John Dehlin. TTF pulled the offending document for a short while, until its attorney, Marc Randazza, sent the LDS Church a letter which said, "At this point, my client is willing to let bygones be bygones. If your client is willing to step back from the brink, and to cease efforts to censor this material, my client is willing to refrain from bringing a claim [of abusing copyright law]."[25][26]