Metadata laws deter people from communicating with journalists Photo: Phil Carrick
Australian journalists make a promise to their confidential sources to protect their identity "in all circumstances". But snooping by the Australian government and security agencies under metadata retention laws have made that promise much more difficult to keep.
Today, Fairfax Media hits back.
From today, we are offering whistleblowers two different ways to communicate with our award-winning investigative journalists, confident that it's as safe as possible from prying eyes.
Securedrop: Send us up to 500 MB with unparalleled security
JournoTips: Send us up to 5 MB and chat with journalists easily
The leak of hundreds of thousands of emails from international bribe factory Unaoil, prompting a series of stories by Fairfax Media's investigations unit, as well as the Snowden revelations and the Panama Papers, illustrate the power of public interest journalism when it's armed with strong documentary evidence.
Whistleblowers have also been crucial in stories exposing corporate wrongdoing in 7-Eleven, the National Australia Bank and the Labor Party and unions in recent years.
In all cases, some or all of the sources involved wanted to remain anonymous. On occasion, even the journalists receiving the information did not know who they were dealing with.
But metadata laws passed late last year mean that phone companies and internet service providers must keep details of communications between people for two years, and this information can be obtained, sometimes without a warrant, by a range of law enforcement agencies.
Journalists have a measure of protection – agencies must obtain a warrant – but applications for warrants are conducted without the reporter's knowledge and in our defence sit two retired judges, both appointed by the government, who have no background in media law.
In response, Fairfax Media has adopted the SecureDrop platform, a project of the US-based not-for-profit Freedom of the Press Foundation. The system allows both messages and files of up to 500 MB and messages to be passed securely to our investigative team.
It uses an anonymous network, encryption, and a clean operating system so that the information is, and remains, anonymous, from when it leaves the leaker's desktop to when it arrives on our reporters'. Users must download and use the Tor browser before they can submit information –– and it's recommended this not be done on the leaker's corporate computers or networks.
The communications trail is wiped routinely so that information does not exist anywhere for long enough to be searched.
The second solution, called JournoTips by Whispli, will allow more impulsive informants to speak up by securely and quickly, passing messages and files to our reporters without the need to enter their personal contact details. They can then converse with them anonymously.
Created originally as a whistleblower system for corporations to allow their people to report wrongdoing within their operations, the system has been modified to allow tip-offs to journalists. The platform encrypts all its communications, and effectively scrubs the IP address of the informant as the information hits platform.
Both methods will be available to users from links embedded in the stories of our investigative reporters, and also on the Investigations landing page of Fairfax Media websites.
