Securedrop is a robust, secure, anonymous system for whistleblowers to convey documents to news organizations, created by Aaron Swartz and taken up by the Freedom of the Press Foundation after his death.
News organizations are prime target for intelligence agencies at all levels, foreign and domestic, and are keenly interested in secure means of receiving docs from sensitive sources. Organizations like First Look (publishers of The Intercept) were early adopters of Securedrop.
Vice is the latest news org to join the party, with a Securedrop instance of their own.
SecureDrop is the safest and best option to protect against interception, online tracking and the prying eyes of the government. Indeed, the need for a SecureDrop was sparked by many of the recent leak prosecutions in the United States. As noted by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which runs SecureDrop and helped install the system for us, “Sources have been investigated because authorities are able to retrieve both metadata and content of communications from third parties like email and phone providers in secret."
“SecureDrop attempts to completely eliminate third parties from the equation so that news organizations can challenge any legal orders that are served on them before handing over any data," the Foundation continued. "SecureDrop also substantially limits the metadata trail that may exist from journalist-source communications in the first place. In addition, it also attempts to provide a safer environment for those communications than regular corporate news networks, which are often compromised.”
Introducing the VICE Media SecureDrop
[Jason Leopold and Derek Mead/Motherboard]
