The New Yorker just launched a pretty awesome tool called Strongbox intended to allow people to anonymously send tips to the newsroom. Though this isn’t in direct response to the recent Department of Justice subpoena of Associated Press phone lines—the New Yorker has been working on this for several years—it certainly could not have come at a better time.
Basically, the program allows anyone to upload information, photos, complaints, documents, etc., that they believe should be reported, and the people on the other end (in this case, the New Yorker) receive an encrypted version that requires a key to unlock the information, which is performed on another computer.
What’s especially beneficial about the program is that the New Yorker isn’t being all proprietary about it. The program itself, Dead Drop, was created by Aaron Swartz, is in fact open-source, and is available for any news agency to use.
Department of Justice, be damned!
