Securing Whistleblowing in the Digital Age: SecureDrop and the Changing Journalistic Practices for Source Protection

Information security tools have gained prominence and importance in the journalism field and are now being adopted more frequently by newsrooms and investigative journalists. SecureDrop, an open-source software for operating whistleblowing platforms, is now a common component of the toolboxes of journalists willing to work with stronger levels of security, especially in regard to source protection. By means of a content analysis of publicly available documents and semi-structured interviews with journalists using the software, this article looks at news organizations’ uses of SecureDrop, journalists’ perceptions of the software's strengths and limitations, and the accountability practices adopted by news organizations in regard to their use of SecureDrop. Overall, this article contributes to the understanding of how SecureDrop and information security in general are entering the journalistic field and becoming accepted journalistic practices.

Sample

In total, 22 news organizations based in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia were included in the sample. These are: ABC News (Australia), Associated Press (AP), Bloomberg News, BuzzFeed News, The Daily Beast, USA Today, CBC News (Canada), Financial Times, Forbes, Gizmodo Media, Huffington Post, The New York Times, The New Internationalist, ProPublica, The Mail & Globe, NBC News (USA), The Guardian, The Intercept, The Mark-up, The Verge, Vice, and The Washington Post.

Main Findings

Results from the news outlets' sample gathered for this article confirm the existence of a growing interest in adopting information security solutions and technologies in the journalistic field, especially, for source protection. Particularly, results provide more evidence about how SecureDrop is progressively becoming an established practice for prominent news outlets in the Anglo-Saxon context. Results of this explorative article are straight-forward: news outlets are expressing similar motivations and needs when it comes to securing their communications and granting confidentiality or anonymity to their sources both publicly and in interviews. SecureDrop has emerged as one of the most helpful tools when it comes to performing these critical journalistic principles and granting anonymity with a stronger level of security. Results also show also how the growing adoption of encryption tools and wider attention to the issue of information security are definitely some of the most visible elements of the so-called “Snowden effect” (Gorman Citation2017) on journalism.