This story is<\/span> part of our special coverage, The News in Crisis<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n When Edward Snowden<\/span> leaked the biggest collection of classified National Security Agency documents in history, he wasn\u2019t just revealing the inner workings of a global surveillance machine. He was also scrambling to evade it. To communicate with the journalists who would publish his secrets, he had to route all his messages over the anonymity software Tor, teach reporters to use the encryption tool PGP by creating a YouTube tutorial that disguised his voice<\/a>, and eventually ditch his comfortable life (and smartphone) in Hawaii to set up a cloak-and-dagger data handoff halfway around the world.<\/p>\n Now, nearly four years later, Snowden has focused the next phase of his career on solving that very specific instance of the panopticon problem: how to protect reporters and the people who feed them information in an era of eroding privacy\u2014without requiring them to have an NSA analyst\u2019s expertise in encryption or to exile themselves to Moscow. \u201cWatch the journalists and you\u2019ll find their sources,\u201d Snowden says. \u201cSo how do we preserve that confidentiality in this new world, when it\u2019s more important than ever?\u201d<\/p>\n Since early last year, Snowden has quietly served as president of a small San Francisco\u2013based nonprofit called the Freedom of the Press Foundation<\/a>. Its mission: to equip the media to do its job at a time when state-\u00adsponsored hackers and government surveillance threaten investigative reporting in ways Woodward and Bernstein never imagined. \u201cNewsrooms don\u2019t have the budget, the sophistication, or the skills to defend themselves in the current environment,\u201d says Snowden, who spoke to WIRED via encrypted video-chat from his home in Moscow. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to provide a few niche tools to make the game a little more fair.\u201d<\/p>\n The group\u2019s 10 staffers and a handful of contract coders, with Snowden\u2019s remote guidance, are working to develop an armory of security upgrades for reporters. Snowden and renowned hacker Bunnie Huang have partnered to develop a hardware modification for the iPhone<\/a>, designed to detect if malware on the device is secretly transmitting a reporter\u2019s data, including location. They\u2019ve recruited Fred Jacobs, one of the coders for the popular encryption app Signal<\/a>, to help build a piece of software called Sunder; the tool would allow journalists to encrypt a trove of secrets and then retrieve them only if several newsroom colleagues combine their passwords to access the data. And the foundation\u2019s coders are building a plug-and-play version of Jitsi, the encrypted video-chat software Snowden himself uses for daily communication. They want newsrooms to be able to install it on their own servers with a few clicks. \u201cThe idea is to make this all paint-by-numbers instead of teaching yourself to be Picasso,\u201d Snowden says.<\/p>\n A brief guide to becoming an anonymous source.<\/p>\n Web<\/strong><\/p>\n The anonymity network Tor obscures your identity by routing your online traffic through computers worldwide. Access it via the web-based Tor Browser to visit any site related to your planned contact with the press. Find a directory of the 35 or so news organizations that maintain SecureDrop<\/a> portals\u2014Tor-enabled inboxes for anonymous tips. Then choose an outlet and leak away.<\/p>\n Phone<\/strong><\/p>\n Buy a burner<\/a>\u2014a cheap, prepaid Android phone\u2014with cash from a nonchain store in an area you\u2019ve never been to before. Don\u2019t carry your regular phone and the burner at the same time, and never turn on the burner at home or work. Create a Gmail and \u00adGoogle Play account from the burner, then install the encrypted calling and text\u00ading app Signal. When you\u2019re done, destroy the burner and ditch its corpse far from home.<\/p>\n Snail mail<\/strong><\/p>\n Pick a distant mailbox, don\u2019t carry your phone on the trip, and\u2014duh\u2014don\u2019t include a real return address.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n But the foundation\u2019s biggest coup has been SecureDrop, a Tor-based system for WikiLeaks-style uploads of leaked \u00admaterials and news tips. The system has now been adopted by dozens of outlets<\/a>, including The Guardian<\/em>, The New York Times<\/em>, and The Washington Post. <\/em>\u201cIt works. I know,\u201d hinted a tweet from Washington Post<\/em> reporter David Fahrenthold the day after he published a leaked video of Donald Trump bragging about sexual assault.<\/p>\n In early 2014, the Freedom of the Press Foundation\u2019s founders—who include the first recipients of Snowden\u2019s leaks, journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras—asked their 30-year-old source to join the group\u2019s board as a largely symbolic gesture. But Snowden surprised the board members by showing up to his first meeting with a list of detailed changes to its 40-plus pages of bylaws. The next year he was unanimously elected its president. \u201cNo one has more practical expertise when it comes to whistleblower and journalist communications,\u201d says Trevor Timm, the group\u2019s executive director. \u201cIt was the perfect fit.\u201d Snowden has refused a salary, instead giving the group more than $60,000 of his fees from speaking engagements over the past year.<\/p>\n Snowden\u2019s own leaks have shown the dire need for the foundation\u2019s work: In early 2015 he revealed that British spies had collected emails from practically every major newspaper and wire service<\/a>. Other signs of encroaching state surveillance have also put journalists on guard. Late last year it emerged that Montreal police had tracked the phone calls and texts of a reporter<\/a> in order to identify sources critical of the department. And in early January, before he had even taken office, Donald Trump called on Congress to investigate a leak to NBC news<\/a>\u2014one that gave the network a sneak peek at an intelligence report on Russia\u2019s role in influencing the US election. In the months since Trump\u2019s victory, the Freedom of the Press Foundation\u2019s phones \u201chave been ringing off the hook\u201d with requests from newsrooms for training sessions, says Timm.<\/p>\n Snowden is quick to note it was the administration of President Obama, not Trump, that indicted him and at least seven others under the Espionage Act for leaking information to journalists. That\u2019s more such indictments than all other presidents in history combined have issued. But Snowden and Timm worry that Trump, with his deep-seated disdain for the media and the full powers of the US Justice Department at his fingertips, will be only too happy to carry forward and expand that precedent.<\/p>\n All of that makes the media\u2019s technical protections from spying more important than ever. \u201cWe can\u2019t fix the surveillance problem overnight,\u201d Snowden says. \u201cBut maybe we can build a shield that will protect anyone who\u2019s standing behind it.\u201d If the group succeeds, perhaps the next Snowden will be able to take refuge not in Moscow but in the encrypted corners of the internet.<\/p>\n Andy Greenberg (@a_greenberg<\/a>) wrote about Google subsidiary Jigsaw<\/a> in issue 24.10.<\/p>\n This article appears in the March issue. Subscribe now<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n https:\/\/www.wired.com\/category\/security\/feed\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Credit to Author: Andy Greenberg| Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2017 12:00:08 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n As president of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Snowden is helping the media beat state-\u00adsponsored hackers and government surveillance. The post Edward Snowden’s New Job: Protecting Reporters From Spies<\/a> appeared first on WIRED<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[10378,10607],"tags":[1001,208,11328,11329,714],"class_list":["post-6619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-security","category-wired","tag-business","tag-magazine","tag-magazine-25-03","tag-news-in-crisis","tag-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6619\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}How to Leak (and Not Get Caught)<\/h2>\n
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