SecureDrop is a whistleblower submission system designed in part by the late Aaron Swartz. It was designed to provide journalists and media organizations a relatively secure and surveillance-proof platform to receive documents from anonymous sources.
It is a Free Software application published under the GNU Affero General public License (AGPL) v3 and managed by the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Any media organization may download, install and customize it to set up an anonymous tipster platform. It requires Tor to function.
The name of the application is SecureDrop, but an organization that sets up an installation can call it any name it wishes, just like in the future, secure email providers would be able to do with Dark Mail. (See Silent Mail, FreedomMail or Lavamail. Whatever it’s called, it will offer the same benefits.)
That’s why you see SafeSource and Strongbox in the title of this post. Strongbox is the name given to an installation of SecureDrop by The New Yorker magazine, which is the first media organization to implement a tipster platform using the application. SafeSource is the name given by Forbes magazine to its own installation of SecureDrop.
With time, more media organizations will be setting up their own anonymous tipster platform using SecureDrop. Who knows what they will call it!
