A discussion on whistle-blowing and how best to make it secure.

I do feel this is a social issue since we all want to know the truth and many of us feel that this truth is being covered up. However, if it is best moved somewhere else, to another forum, please move it.

I have been thinking how to allow whistle-blowers to blow their whistle without being detected so easily. Security in this instance is about total in-security and getting as much distribution and coverage as possible and without identification.

Anything submitted would have to be submitted to multiple people at the same time in different countries or locations.

The Tor idea is a really good one and could be used to fragment a submission and join it back up again later if necessary. Although I think it is too complcated and 'secure'. What this needs is a method which has neither complication nor security.

If a piece of text for example, was submitted, then as long as multiple people got the same submission sent at the same time, then the text would be effectively 'distributed' and could not be contained once it had automatically been sent out. Like a sentence spoken on a radio talk show, the trasmission has gone and the words in that sentence cannot ever be retracted.

If ANYONE (yes, even the government agencies) could sign up to receive these anonymous submissions, then this would make it much more secure. There could be various methods of distribution not just email - ftp, even snail mail if necessary with a small charge to cover admin & postage.

Basically the safety is in the distribution to as many people as possible and a true 'honest' whistleblower would not care if they received money from their submission. The insecurity comes when an organisation (such as a news company) wants to hold onto that 'news' for themselves and then they become the focus for the authorities because they have details of the whistleblower and can often identify him.

It would be easy for the submission part of this process to be on the front page of the site, so that everyone visiting (even robots/hackers/etc) could be the potential whistleblower and the only thing which would be 'sensitive' information would be the email list of subscribers the submission was sent to. Even then, our email addresses are probebly known to the authorities and those people who are going to be watched and monitored have identified themselves in other ways, not just because they signed up to receive whistleblowers submissions.

Yes, as a subscriber, you would get lots of crap, but some gold nuggets too. I fully expect news agencies and anyone interested - bloggers, investigation sites etc to sign up too. The site would receive millions of hits so would be financed on advertising revenue. If the web programs were open source, then that would mean that there could be many such sites and a whistleblowers 'ring' could be created of similar sites, so if one was taken down, then others would take up the focus. A submission taken by one could be sent around the ring and so all ring site subscribers would get notified (obviously each subscriber to any ring-site only wants one notification of a submittal). The ring would be like a social network multiplying the number of subscribers who received the submittal.

Any one of those subscribers could take up the story and run with it, investigating and digging deeper into any issues which interested them.

Ideas or thoughts on this please?

You sing like a parrot

Every person signed up would be on a 'special' list.

Ok, special lists are just that - special in that they describe people who go against the mainstream and against what the authorities want us to believe. So... many people are probably currently on the special list. Probably about half of the folks on here do not believe what the authorities want us to, so are they on the special list too? Yes, I guess they are.

There will have to be some who go to the authorities "holiday camps" and those others who go along with what they believe we should. It is coming to a point when sides have to be declared and joined.

Actually, fear is what will keep us subdued and under-the-thumb.