12.29.17
Another Option for EPO Whistleblowers
Summary: New ProtonMail account provides another, potentially safer, option for submitting internal documents/communications to Techrights
OVER the holidays (Christmas and the period extending all the way to New Year’s Day) we help improve transparency at the EPO and show anyone — the public included (not just insiders) — what is/was happening inside the EPO. We decided that it’s important to have it permanently documented. Over time we may want to link back to older material in order to support particular assertions. A lot of this stuff deserves to be in the public domain; Battistelli is leaving in 6 months and his bad behaviour isn’t something which — as the metaphor goes — he should “take to the grave”.
For those wishing to help the endeavours, there’s now an E-mail address which is more secure than my own (self-hosted, but lacking end-to-end encryption except PGP). That address is epo-leaks@protonmail.ch
“We remind people not to use real names.”For anyone willing to anonymously disclose EPO-related documents, the ProtonMail address may be a more secure one to use. As always, we take the liberty to remove metadata or anything else which might give away identities. In over 11 years we have never betrayed or caused any trouble for a source (and we have had internal sources for over a decade, going back to the Novell days).
Additional details and advice were also published in:
- European Patent Office (EPO) Whistleblowing Guidelines
- European Patent Office (EPO) Whistleblowing Guidelines: Motivation and Impact of Leaks
- Potential Targets of European Patent Office (EPO) Whistleblowing
We remind people not to use real names. We judge pseudonyms based on their track record and the substance. It is best for us not to know the real identity of submitters; we just need to know that the information/material is authentic. We do verify. We never published inauthentic material. ‘Haters’ can say whatever they want about our style (tone/language), but they cannot argue that we publish falsehoods. █
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