Claudio Agosti
Good Technology Collective
Marco Calamari
Punto Informatico
Giovanni Pellerano
co-founder Hermes Center
Fabio Pietrosanti
president Hermes Center
This workshop is for journalists who wish to learn how to receive material from anonymous sources.
During the workshop, the Hermes Study Centre will be at your disposal to enable you to test a particular system during the Festival that can be used later for professional work. This system, as it is conceived, does not allow anyone to access the documents, with the exception of the journalist selected by the same source. The software and the technology of the system prevent the Hermes Study Center from breaking that promise.
This project is part of an experiment addressed to the participants of the Festival and is divided in two sessions, one in Italian and one in English. The aim is to enable journalists to receive material from anonymous sources, properly called whistleblowers.
Whistleblowing is one of the most innovative tools used in investigative journalism in recent years. It is like a confidence from a source, which has always existed in the resources of journalism. Its recent use, mixing publishing activity and the Internet, has brought Digital Whistleblowing into the limelight.
A source, rather than establish a preferential contact with a journalist, needs to know which is the web address that corresponds to the secure email of the journalist. The innovation is that each time a journalist publishes a report, he can be sure that all the people involved, even remotely, will read the article. That is the point where potential sources may take courage. To give opportunities to these sources to communicate with journalists is the best way to stimulate the will of the whistleblower. In this scenario, the duty of the journalist is to ensure the best possible protection, because it is clear from many indicators that digital communications are often compromised.
The system that we are going to use is GlobaLeaks. In order to better evaluate the system, journalists are invited to send an email to projects@logioshermes.org. We will reply, showing the (simple) technological requirements.