International Law

Hints and Tips for Whistleblowers - trusted media contact details wanted

The Reporters Without Borders: new updated version of the "Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents" inspired us to get around to revamping what had become a rather too long, but important blog article, which gave Hints and Tips for, initially, Home Office whistleblowers, investigative journalists and bloggers. This was published originally in May 2006, during the height of the media frenzy surrounding the buck passing and musical chairs when the "not fit for purpose" Home Office blob spawned the Ministry of (in)Justice.

The original blog post and comments remain:

Home Office whistleblowers - hints and tips

but the actual Hints and Tips "below the fold" section, has been moved and broken up into more manageable pieces, to form a new mini-blog:

Hints and Tips for Whistleblowers mini-blog - "Technical Hints and Tips for the anonymity of sources for Whistleblowers, Investigative Journalists, Campaign Activists and Political Bloggers from Spy Blog"

Please feel free to comment and correct any errors.

There is a section which needs some help from the readers of Spy Blog, namely, to compile a list of public contact details of reasonably trustworthy journalists, bloggers, independent regulators, politicians etc., and their specialist fields of interest, who might be interested receiving story tips and whistleblower leaks from UK Government Departments or public or private sector organisations.

They need to have some reasonable track record of protecting the identities of their journalistic, or blogger, or complainant contacts and sources.

This list is intended to help a potential whistleblower sound out people, to see if they are likely to take up their cause, and to avoid a scattergun approach of random emails or phone calls or letters etc, which might tip off the scoundrels who the whistleblower is trying to expose, in the public interest.

Obviously only the public contact details will be re-published, as we hope and assume, that all of the people on the list will have multiple email accounts, PGP public encryption keys, web sites, blogs, mobile phones, fax and landline numbers, VoIP etc. i.e. that they are all therefore "suspicious" according to the latest Police / Government Climate of Fear propaganda posters.

Full post as published by Spy Blog on March 14, 2008 (boomark / email).