Last week-end I attended the FOSDEM conference in Brussels (more on that later). One of the talk I was really looking forward to attend was about Securedrop, an encrypted application that allow communication and document sharing between whistleblowers and journalists (See “Securedrop” talk by @redshiftzero).
The talk was really interesting and resonated with an article from The Intercept I read not long ago: “My life as a new york times reporter in the shadow of the war on terror”.
The post explains how the attitude of the US government towards leaks shifted after the 9/11, and how it gradually went after sources and journalists that were revealing secret operations, with absolutely scary digital spying bits (the journalist was told to stop Googling someone !).
Hence the need for Securedrop app, which goals is to allow sources to leave as few data trail as possible. Which can be really tricky, especially for non-tech saavy people; even searching for “securedrop” is already a trail that can be used against a source (“why did you search for that ?”).
I was astonished by the level of security journalists have to go through to use Securedrop (non-connected workstation, in dedicated rooms, using single-use USB bootable OSes, …).
The talk and the article are complementary and I encourage you to look at them if you have an hour to spare.