Whistleblowers have always been a crucial resource for journalists for decades and some of the most notorious investigations from the history of journalism have been possible thanks to the relationships of journalists with some whistleblowers who exposed wrongdoings aiming at making them news. Among the various possible journalist-source relationships, the one between a reporter and a whistleblower can bring to very powerful results: whistleblowers bring evidence, insights or otherwise unaccessible documents and data, while journalists provide publicity, impact in the public sphere and exposure to the public.
The period 2010â2020 has seen a growing relevance of whistleblowing cases that were able to impact globally on major and international debates around geopolitics, Internet regulation, policy and digital rights and freedoms (Di Salvo 2019). The names of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden, among others, have filled the media and the politics agendas in different regards and are still making the news for different reasons. The WikiLeaks saga and the aftermath of the NSA revelations are still âcold casesâ and their presence is still visible in several media discourses, also because of the legal and human consequences their main characters are facing. Toward the end of the decade, in 2018, the name of the Cambridge Analytica (CA) company appeared in the news when another whistleblower, CA former employee Christopher Wylie, entered the public discourse as the source of the media revelations about the misuse of Facebook data in the context of the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US Presidential elections operated by the company. By looking at these international cases, it appears clear how the public debate about the âdatafied societyâ (Hintz et al. 2018) and its implications has somehow grown bigger because of the contributions of whistleblowers who were able to, thanks to cooperation with the media and journalists, bring evidence to support discussions and policy changes. In parallel, during this period there was also a clear demonstration of the inherent dangers of whistleblowing, leaks and their own grey zones. The involvement of WikiLeaks in the so-called Russiagate and the role of Assangeâs organization in the diffusion of the hacked Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails in the context of the 2016 US Presidential elections brought clear insights about the potential perils and controversial sides of leaks. What Gabriela Coleman has defined (2017) as âPublic interest hacksâ (PIH), cyberattacks whose aim is extrapolating information and data from otherwise closed digital archives with the purpose of leaking them in the public sphere, have also become a routine practice in the past years and with purposes that span from activism to political disturbance or even disinformation campaigns. Whereas whistleblowing can be extremely beneficial to society and public opinion, different forms of leaks such as PIH can come with a less clear ethical stance. Journalists, who can be preferred recipients in both cases, need to refresh and update their ethical propositions when it comes to dealing with sensible or radical sources, be they whistleblowers or malicious hackers.
In parallel with public interest-oriented whistleblowing and hacker sources, other forms of leaks have gained relevance in recent years, starting from âMegaleaksâ (Lynch 2013; Woodall 2018), leaks where large amounts of data are involved. The âPanama Papersâ and âParadise Papersâ investigations, in 2016 and 2017 respectively, have standardized a practice that has been becoming more routinized since the first WikiLeaks releases in 2010. In âMegaleaksâ occurrences, journalists may find themselves dealing with terabytes of data and in need of applying statistical methods and collaborative practices to find and report the most newsworthy stories included in the datasets. Despite the momentum that whistleblowing has gained in the past ten years, it is important to remember that it has been a resource for journalism for decades and that, at least in the West, it has become a routinized practice at least since the 1960s (Johnson 2003, p. 4). The Watergate scandal is definitely the most historicized case (Fink and Schudson 2013), but other instances are behind some major historical events such as âthe disappearedâ phenomenon under the Argentinian military regime. For example, it was Adolfo Scilingo, a former naval officer turned whistleblower, who in 1994 revealed the details of the horrible practice of eliminating political dissidents by throwing them in the ocean from airplanes during the years of the regime. Scilingo approached PĂĄgina/12âs journalist Horacio Verbitsky and their meeting later became a published interview (Schiffrin 2014, p. 205). US journalism, in particular, has met several whistleblowing cases on the national, regional and metropolitan level, involving institutions of different kinds, from city halls to NASA (Johnson 2003). Regardless of their exposure and impact, whistleblowers are likely to be considered as among the most powerful sources available to journalists to break news because of their exclusive access to otherwise unreachable information. In particular, in contexts where censorship is strong or access to public information and data through Freedom of Information (FOIA) legislations or other channels is limited, whistleblowers can be a unique chance for reporters to serve the public interest.
In particular, whistleblowers are among the most sensible sources journalists can rely on and are consequently exposed to major perils when they decide to go on the record and expose wrongdoings of any kind, and to give their trust to journalists. The debate about Internet surveillance that arose in the wake of the Snowden revelations has also been a wake-up call for journalists about the dangers they face while doing their job in the datafied society and by using online communication tools. The danger of losing sources or exposing them is one of the most severe fears for journalists, and digital technologies and surveillance capabilities have created new threat scenarios that journalists need to acknowledge and respond to (Lashmar 2017). The awareness raised by the Snowden revelations also started a learning curve toward information security practices and safeguards (Froomkin 2013; Coleman 2019). The need for journalists to use encryption-based technology to protect their work and their sources has been widely emphasized in the wake of the Snowden revelations. Different advocacy organizations, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation,1 Reporters Without Borders,2 the Freedom of the Press Foundation3 and the Digital Defenders Partnership4 have released online practical guides and handbooks about encryption tools and information security best practices explicitly addressing journalists. However, academia has contributed less extensively to this debate, and the available literature about the implementation and use of encryption is still limited. Whereas recent major whistleblowing cases such as Snowden (Di Salvo 2018) and the WikiLeaks saga (Brevini 2017) have been assessed extensively by media scholars, the technological implications and solutions offered in performing whistleblowing in the journalistic field in a digital context is still mostly an unexplored field of research. Nevertheless, digital technologies and networked structures of the current media environment have had a profound impact on how whistleblowing is perpetuated and embedded in journalism routines. This is visible in at least three patterns that affect the contemporary relevance of whistleblowing in the journalistic realm, its own weight and scale, and the newer journalistic practices involved. In particular, when it comes to journalistic practices playing a particular part in whistleblowing cases in the digital era, encryption and information security tools for protecting both journalists and sources have a fundamental role in the safety of both (Posetti 2017).
This book aims at making sense of a particular phenomenon in the context of the use of encryption for journalistic purposes. Whistleblowing platforms are increasingly becoming a common tool in journalism, and are one of the strategies that journalists can adopt in communicating with whistleblowers in a safer way and to obtain data and information without exposing sources to the risk of being identified, tracked, exposed or put i...