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Whistleblowing Platforms

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Digital Whistleblowing Platforms in Journalism

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Abstract

This chapter introduces whistleblowing platforms, by offering a definition and an interpretative theoretical context. First, it includes a historical overview of the phenomenon in the post-WikiLeaks phase, by offering details about pioneering projects and their failures. SecureDrop and GlobaLeaks, the two most adopted software for whistleblowing platforms, are also presented. Moreover, whistleblowing platforms are also discussed in the context of the expansion of the boundaries of journalism as a “boundary-work” phenomenon between journalism and hacking and as a media innovation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Earl and Kimport, in their book, refer explicitly to activism. The author is here applying their definition beyond the activism context, although it is related to whistleblowing at large and digital whistleblowing platforms.

  2. 2.

    The Principles are named after the Italian city of Perugia, where the annual International Journalism Festival takes place. The document originated during a meeting of journalists, academics and activists that took place in 2018 at the Festival.

  3. 3.

    http://www.cryptome.org

  4. 4.

    The investigation is available here: http://www.aljazeera.com/palestinepapers/

  5. 5.

    The definition comes from the project’s homepage: https://www.GlobaLeaks.org/

  6. 6.

    The Hermes Center website is available here: http://www.logioshermes.org

  7. 7.

    Available here: http://www.logioshermes.org/home/projects-technologies/GlobaLeaks/

  8. 8.

    Aaron Swartz was a US hacker and activist born in 1986. During his lifetime, Swartz was involved in several projects and Internet campaigns for Internet freedom, free speech and digital civil rights. Among other things, Swartz was the initial coder of the RSS feed standard and was one of the initiators of Reddit. Moreover, he contributed to the Creative Commons initiative, under Lawrence Lessig’s supervision and was among the organizers of the anti-SOPA and PIPA movement, two US law copyright proposals, that posed severe risks to Internet freedom. Swartz was also a vocal campaigner for open access to scholarly literature. In 2011, Swartz was involved in a lawsuit by academic publisher JSTOR following his downloading of thousands of paywalled academic papers from their network. Charged under the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), Swartz faced a risk of a decades-long sentence. In January 2013, aged 27, Aaron Swartz killed himself. Justin Peters’ book The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet (2016) is the most comprehensive resource on the life and work of Aaron Swartz.

  9. 9.

    Freedom of the Press Foundation is a New York-based NGO dealing with media and Internet freedom. FPF manages different crowdsourcing initiatives aiming at providing funds to journalistic initiatives, including WikiLeaks. On its Board of Directors are whistleblowers Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden, among other key figures in US national security journalism and digital security. The FPF website is: https://freedom.press

  10. 10.

    The definition comes from the project’s website: https://SecureDrop.org/faq#what_is

  11. 11.

    Westlund and Lewis specify that “this is not to suggest that technologies in and of themselves have agency and power; they remain socially constructed and instructed. Indeed, even as technologies increasingly facilitate automation, they are not entirely autonomous” (Westlund and Lewis 2014).

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  1. Institute of Media and Journalism, Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano, Switzerland

    Philip Di Salvo

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Di Salvo, P. (2020). Whistleblowing Platforms. In: Digital Whistleblowing Platforms in Journalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38505-7_3

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