How to Discreetly Leak Important Information to Techrights
Techrights has had its busiest year this past year (so has the sister site). Despite me sleeping a lot more than I did in the past 2 decades (more sleep, in my experience, results in fewer typos and better insights) we have collectively managed to post more articles and better articles, judging by some common criteria. A lot was owing to courageous whistleblowers and we expect more of them (dissatisfaction leaks to leaks). Some of my ex-colleagues became whistleblowers as well. Our publications inspired them to do this. We now have a different sort of problem: backlog (too many leaks we've not fully gotten around to dealing with, only preliminarily assess). But that means more choice and sometimes we can delay publication for timely considerations and increased impact (it's one of the reasons we've paused our series about the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) and are still sitting on amazing stories about RMS).
Sometimes people contact to ask us how to securely communicate with our team. They might ask this over E-mail, over IRC, or some other medium. In 2026 many people still don't use End-to-End E-mail encryption, so we must facilitate other means. We recognise the reality that people don't have a strong desire to create a new E-mail account or learn GPG/PGP just to send a few E-mails or blow the whistle once. Death threats are another matter.
Some years ago we published multi-part series about how to contact us securely. Not much has changed since then, with small exceptions, though we have since then experimented with SecureDrop and a German equivalent/counterpart. Aaron Swartz was one of the original developers of the former, but many remember Aaron Swartz for things he had nothing to do with and did not even like.
One communication option is secure chat (voice), but to enable this option one is best off contacting me privately over IRC. From that point on we can establish a secure channel for everything. It also helps weed out fakes or spies pretending to be sources. █
Image source: SecureDrop