WSJ Starts Its Own Wikileaks Alternative: SafeHouse

Every news organization would love to have access to the sort of document dumps Wikileaks gets, but no one relishes the thought of working with Julian Assange. So a number of outlets have experimented with creating their own whistleblower-friendly file-sharing systems.

Among U.S. newspapers, The Wall Street Journal is first to the finish line. Through a new site, WSJ Safehouse, readers can upload documents to a secure server where the paper’s editors — but no one else — will be able to access them via encrypted connections.

“Our journalists have always received documents from sources, and, increasingly, these documents are digital,” says Kevin Delaney, managing editor of WSJ.com. Worried about leaving an electronic trail, sources have sometimes taken to printing out and hand-delivering documents — a method that renders them less useful to reporters. “We needed to create a mechanism to send us these documents in a way that they and we felt was secure,” says Delaney.

Cutting out third parties means there’s no email provider to subpoena in the event that a tipster’s information leads to a lawsuit or criminal investigation. Even though such subpoenas are rare, the fear of them sometimes prevents those with information from sharing it. “Generally there’s a realization among the reporters and editors here that this does happen on the beat and  we’re probably missing opportunities because of it,” Delaney says.

He acknowledges Wikileaks as an inspiration for WSJ SafeHouse. “Wikileaks has had a huge amount of impact on the journalistic landscape,” he says. “They’ve been a watershed.”

A high-ranking news editor at the Journal will be tasked with evaluating incoming documents and authenticating them with the help of reporters. “We won’t publish anything unless we have confidence in it,” Delaney says.

New York Times executive editor Bill Keller said earlier this year that his paper was also investigating the possibility of its own Wikileaks-style secure electronic dropbox. Asked about that effort, a Times spokeswoman says, “We’re continuing to work on it.”

 

 

 

 

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