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[Former reporter here] I have worked with confidential sources, and there are a number of things you can do, as a whistle blower, to protect yourself. Phone ca

by vonnik 10y ago

[Former reporter here] I have worked with confidential sources, and there are a number of things you can do, as a whistle blower, to protect yourself. Phone calls are better than files, generally speaking, and you should be calling from a burner; i.e. a pre-paid phone that is not in your name. You shouldn't even give your real name to the reporter on first contact. Reporters take notes and some of them have to share their sourcing with editors. So be really clear with them how they will treat your real identity, if you choose to share it. Face to face meetings are sometimes better than phone calls. You should assume, when you're handling highly sensitive information, that the reporter's devices may eventually be hacked, bugged or subpoena'd, so make sure that an electronic trail does not lead back to you. You should carefully choose the journalists you leak to. The best choice will have to be well sourced. That's because the information you leak to them, in most cases, will have to be confirmed. That is, they will have to call other insiders they know and ask "Is X true?" If they don't have other sources, the information you provide will probably not make it to the public. Reporters also get contacted by a lot of nut jobs, so early on, do what you must to establish credibility. Trust has to be established both ways.

lazaroclapp 10y ago
> Phone calls are better than files, generally speaking, and you should be calling from a burner; i.e. a pre-paid phone that is not in your name. Wouldn't you still be identifiable based on voice biometrics? Or by the security camera video of whichever store you buy the burner phone from? And if meeting in person, you could be trivially shadowed. It still looks to me like "Phone calls are better than files" is completely backwards. Files can be transferred over onion routing or other darknets, carry less identifiable information and can be digitally signed to establish identity as being the same source over multiple leaks.
- gricardo99 10y ago
  Phone calls and in-person meetings are far less likely to end up leaving behind proof (provable in court) of information you passed to someone. If you send files, you have to first create or possess the files. That can leave behind hard evidence. Evidence that you bought a burner phone or met someone isn’t quite the same as evidence that you passed specific information. And if you're under surveillance, being shadowed, then clearly you're going to have a lot of trouble using any means.
  - sitkack 10y ago
    Files also contain lots of extra metadata you aren't aware of , images have EXIF (camera serial number, gps location), PDF has creator, timestamps, machine ids, etc. Files aren't just files.
olivierlacan 10y ago
I'm not quite sure you realize how risky to sources the methods of contact you suggest are. I understand your point of view as a former reporter, clearly you know what works best for the receiving end. But burners without a voice modulator of some sort are very likely a huge deterrent for most potential sources because they don't know whether they can trust the cell network (localisation, voice identification). Face to face meetings sounds preposterous for someone who would risk prosecution under the espionage act for instance. I know that's a rare scenario, but in more common cases there are still clear inherent risks in meeting face to face with a journalist. And that's not even considering the potential time and costs involved in reaching a journalist with national/international reach. Regarding nut jobs, that clearly sounds difficult to parse. But at the risk of sounding like I'm hounding on you, there seems to be a misunderstanding on the part of journalists of the kinds of risks sources are putting themselves into. Worse yet, an underestimation of how much journalists – through their expectations and treatment of source data — passively and routinely put their own sources at risk by being illiterate in maters of operational security (encryption, surveillance-self-defense, network security, etc). Just read the account of how difficult it was for Edward Snowden to reach out to Glenn Greenwald for a perfect demonstration of these issues: https://theintercept.com/2014/10/28/smuggling-snowden-secrets/ https://theintercept.com/2014/10/28/smuggling-snowden-secret... He had to enlist outside help to get a journalist to stop fucking around with operational security. This in turn is perhaps why Snowden is still free and alive to this day.
- dcposch 10y ago
  > Face to face meetings sounds preposterous for someone who would risk prosecution under the espionage act for instance Snowden met face to face with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Things are improving. Lots of journalists have Signal now.
- vonnik 10y ago
  I'm not sure you know what you're talking about. I'm talking about what has worked for the confidential sources I had, and the means they chose to communicate with me, which in fact prevented me or my org from knowing who they were. (They were not up against the intelligence agencies of the US, but nonetheless they did not want to be known, and succeeded.) Investigations usually happen in retrospect, after leaks have been made public. And the data that is most searchable surfaces leads most quickly. Files and emails are the most searchable thing of all. Easy to copy. Stored many times as they travel. That is less true of voice. And even less true of face to face meetings, done right. So sure, use a voice modulator. That's a good idea. Even better: send a paper envelope full of documents printed on someone else's machine; wear latex glove and dab the stamp with tap water rather than saliva. Journalists have a filtering problem that you don't seem to understand. They are inundated with wackos hawking "news" that's really just a figment of the imagination. Partisan sources pretending to be neutral spin them everyday. A good source, with good information, has to realize that and break through to the reporter by demonstrating authenticity, because the reporter is overwhelmed. If you don't care about breaking through, then don't do it. It's not a misunderstanding on the journalists' part; its the nature of their job. They don't have time to wade through all the crazy claims. Everything's hackable. People should assume that reporters and their organizations will have a lapse in security, that they cannot withstand the collective efforts of intelligence agencies. Just like any other company in the world and the DNC... And those sources should arrange to protect themselves if their communications are found by someone who's not the reporter.
rdtsc 10y ago
> Phone calls are better than files, generally speaking, and you should be calling from a burner; i.e. a pre-paid phone that is not in your name. Is that fairly easy to do? I heard in some countries it is hard to get a sim card without a proper ID. How easy is to get a burner phone in US without raising red flags?
- jxf 10y ago
  > How easy is to get a burner phone in US without raising red flags? Trivial. I see them all the time at grocery stores, pharmacies, et cetera.
  - mmagin 10y ago
    I thought they started requiring identification to buy those at least 5 years ago.
    - skissane 10y ago
      Suppose a leaker, or even a bad person like a criminal or terrorist, wants to get a burner phone – what is to stop them from paying e.g. a homeless person to do it? (Many homeless people have photo ID, even with valid addresses on them, albeit addresses they haven't actually lived at in a while.)
    - samstave 10y ago
      T-mobile will sell you a prepaid sim and ask you no questions at all.
throwerang 10y ago
Non-rhetorical question: What's the best way to leak from the press? Suppose a whistleblower inside, say, the NYT, has internal evidence that demonstrates some kind of negligence or malfeasance in the important task of informing the public? Who would be the right party to leak to, for one thing? Another press institution? Also, has anything like this ever, like, actually happened? If so, when? If not, why not?
- memonkey 10y ago
  Most likely not the answer you're looking for... The most recent act of negligence by a journalistic institution that has happened recently was reported by The Intercept (Glenn Greenwald's gig) about the Washington Post's reporting on how Russia was behind the "fake news" propaganda that was unfortunately in itself a sort of propaganda. To discover why, you'll have to read those articles yourself. In any case, I think journalists typically keep each other in check. And, thankfully, in prestigious institutions you're judged by the quality of your work and whether or not it can be fact checked. Unfortunately, reported facts in the United States are about as big of a hand patting Barack Obama on the back after winning the next election. Everything is irony and nothing is sincerity.
upofadown 10y ago
Well OK, but the most useful thing about securedrop is that you can use it to leak documents that are already in electronic form. You can't really send files from a burner phone and having to actually meet someone to give them a USB drive is pointlessly inconvenient. For actual communication that might identify you, sending a plain text file over something like securedrop is much safer than using a burner phone to call an endpoint that is pretty much for sure under heavy surveillance. If you don't know about metadata then you probably shouldn't do this until you are done with the required research.

by vonnik 10y ago

lazaroclapp 10y ago

> Phone calls are better than files, generally speaking, and you should be calling from a burner; i.e. a pre-paid phone that is not in your name. Wouldn't you still be identifiable based on voice biometrics? Or by the security camera video of whichever store you buy the burner phone from? And if meeting in person, you could be trivially shadowed. It still looks to me like "Phone calls are better than files" is completely backwards. Files can be transferred over onion routing or other darknets, carry less identifiable information and can be digitally signed to establish identity as being the same source over multiple leaks.

gricardo99 10y ago
Phone calls and in-person meetings are far less likely to end up leaving behind proof (provable in court) of information you passed to someone. If you send files, you have to first create or possess the files. That can leave behind hard evidence. Evidence that you bought a burner phone or met someone isn’t quite the same as evidence that you passed specific information. And if you're under surveillance, being shadowed, then clearly you're going to have a lot of trouble using any means.
- sitkack 10y ago
  Files also contain lots of extra metadata you aren't aware of , images have EXIF (camera serial number, gps location), PDF has creator, timestamps, machine ids, etc. Files aren't just files.

olivierlacan 10y ago

I'm not quite sure you realize how risky to sources the methods of contact you suggest are. I understand your point of view as a former reporter, clearly you know what works best for the receiving end. But burners without a voice modulator of some sort are very likely a huge deterrent for most potential sources because they don't know whether they can trust the cell network (localisation, voice identification). Face to face meetings sounds preposterous for someone who would risk prosecution under the espionage act for instance. I know that's a rare scenario, but in more common cases there are still clear inherent risks in meeting face to face with a journalist. And that's not even considering the potential time and costs involved in reaching a journalist with national/international reach. Regarding nut jobs, that clearly sounds difficult to parse. But at the risk of sounding like I'm hounding on you, there seems to be a misunderstanding on the part of journalists of the kinds of risks sources are putting themselves into. Worse yet, an underestimation of how much journalists – through their expectations and treatment of source data — passively and routinely put their own sources at risk by being illiterate in maters of operational security (encryption, surveillance-self-defense, network security, etc). Just read the account of how difficult it was for Edward Snowden to reach out to Glenn Greenwald for a perfect demonstration of these issues: https://theintercept.com/2014/10/28/smuggling-snowden-secrets/ https://theintercept.com/2014/10/28/smuggling-snowden-secret... He had to enlist outside help to get a journalist to stop fucking around with operational security. This in turn is perhaps why Snowden is still free and alive to this day.

dcposch 10y ago
> Face to face meetings sounds preposterous for someone who would risk prosecution under the espionage act for instance Snowden met face to face with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Things are improving. Lots of journalists have Signal now.
vonnik 10y ago
I'm not sure you know what you're talking about. I'm talking about what has worked for the confidential sources I had, and the means they chose to communicate with me, which in fact prevented me or my org from knowing who they were. (They were not up against the intelligence agencies of the US, but nonetheless they did not want to be known, and succeeded.) Investigations usually happen in retrospect, after leaks have been made public. And the data that is most searchable surfaces leads most quickly. Files and emails are the most searchable thing of all. Easy to copy. Stored many times as they travel. That is less true of voice. And even less true of face to face meetings, done right. So sure, use a voice modulator. That's a good idea. Even better: send a paper envelope full of documents printed on someone else's machine; wear latex glove and dab the stamp with tap water rather than saliva. Journalists have a filtering problem that you don't seem to understand. They are inundated with wackos hawking "news" that's really just a figment of the imagination. Partisan sources pretending to be neutral spin them everyday. A good source, with good information, has to realize that and break through to the reporter by demonstrating authenticity, because the reporter is overwhelmed. If you don't care about breaking through, then don't do it. It's not a misunderstanding on the journalists' part; its the nature of their job. They don't have time to wade through all the crazy claims. Everything's hackable. People should assume that reporters and their organizations will have a lapse in security, that they cannot withstand the collective efforts of intelligence agencies. Just like any other company in the world and the DNC... And those sources should arrange to protect themselves if their communications are found by someone who's not the reporter.

rdtsc 10y ago

> Phone calls are better than files, generally speaking, and you should be calling from a burner; i.e. a pre-paid phone that is not in your name. Is that fairly easy to do? I heard in some countries it is hard to get a sim card without a proper ID. How easy is to get a burner phone in US without raising red flags?

jxf 10y ago
> How easy is to get a burner phone in US without raising red flags? Trivial. I see them all the time at grocery stores, pharmacies, et cetera.
- mmagin 10y ago
  I thought they started requiring identification to buy those at least 5 years ago.
  - skissane 10y ago
    Suppose a leaker, or even a bad person like a criminal or terrorist, wants to get a burner phone – what is to stop them from paying e.g. a homeless person to do it? (Many homeless people have photo ID, even with valid addresses on them, albeit addresses they haven't actually lived at in a while.)
  - samstave 10y ago
    T-mobile will sell you a prepaid sim and ask you no questions at all.

throwerang 10y ago

Non-rhetorical question: What's the best way to leak from the press? Suppose a whistleblower inside, say, the NYT, has internal evidence that demonstrates some kind of negligence or malfeasance in the important task of informing the public? Who would be the right party to leak to, for one thing? Another press institution? Also, has anything like this ever, like, actually happened? If so, when? If not, why not?

memonkey 10y ago
Most likely not the answer you're looking for... The most recent act of negligence by a journalistic institution that has happened recently was reported by The Intercept (Glenn Greenwald's gig) about the Washington Post's reporting on how Russia was behind the "fake news" propaganda that was unfortunately in itself a sort of propaganda. To discover why, you'll have to read those articles yourself. In any case, I think journalists typically keep each other in check. And, thankfully, in prestigious institutions you're judged by the quality of your work and whether or not it can be fact checked. Unfortunately, reported facts in the United States are about as big of a hand patting Barack Obama on the back after winning the next election. Everything is irony and nothing is sincerity.

upofadown 10y ago

Well OK, but the most useful thing about securedrop is that you can use it to leak documents that are already in electronic form. You can't really send files from a burner phone and having to actually meet someone to give them a USB drive is pointlessly inconvenient. For actual communication that might identify you, sending a plain text file over something like securedrop is much safer than using a burner phone to call an endpoint that is pretty much for sure under heavy surveillance. If you don't know about metadata then you probably shouldn't do this until you are done with the required research.