SecureDrop Leak Tool Produces a Massive Trove of Prison Docs

If anyone is interested in why something like this is important, you might enjoy "The Insider", a movie made about Jeffery Wigand, the VP of Research and Development at Brown and Williamson. (Then the third biggest tobacco company.)

One of the main themes of the movie is how information can be known by everyone, but legally suppressed to the point that it's not actionable.

Wigand had tried to give the information to journalists, but then that information could be suppressed because of Wigand's confidentiality agreements.

A tool like SecureDrop or WikiLeaks allows a new method of releasing information to the public, because it obscures the source while turning it into public information. CBS attempted to do effect the same change (private information into public) by having Wigand deliver his information while under subpoena, but it turns out a prior confidentiality agreement can override your responsibility to tell the whole truth during a subpoena. So a tool like this is basically legal innovation that fills a need that can clearly benefit the world.

Interesting that this focuses so heavily on SecureDrop. Here are the comments on the original article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10547959