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Monday, April 23, 2012

GlobaLeaks - Open Source Whistleblowing Framework

WHAT IS GlobaLeaks? GlobaLeaks is the first open-source whistleblowing framework. It empowers anyone to easily set up and maintain a whistleblowing platform. GlobaLeaks can help many different types of users: media organizations, activist groups, corporations and public agencies.

Why we think transparency is important

GlobaLeaks strives to increase accountability and transparency in our society. When information that affects the public remains hidden, democracy and economies cease to function properly.

We are interested in fulfilling the needs of diverse public interest use cases. From usage by media to public agencies, from corporations to activists. We use the term framework to emphasize the flexibility of the GlobaLeaks platform. For example, the whistleblower will be anonymous by default, but if the whistleblower chooses to disclose their identity, the framework allows them to do so.

We believe the public should demand that governments and companies be more accountable for their actions. And we believe governments and economies that embrace openness will benefit by promoting trust and enabling informed discourse and decision-making.

We use the term “framework” to emphasize the flexibility of GlobaLeaks. For example, the whistleblower will be anonymous by default, but if whistleblowers choose to disclose their identity, the framework allows them to do so. Entities that require whistleblowers to identify themselves can do that as well.

We believe it is important to make an open-source tool because this allows many types of people to use GlobaLeaks and enables the creation of a community that can constantly make contributions to improve the framework.

How we will open society

Organizations that promote whistleblowing and transparency are not a new development. There are people who have been active in this field for decades, and groups such as Public Concern At Work have existed for years. Other organizations such as WikiLeaks have more recently captured the world’s attention. Not all of these groups have the same definition of “whistleblowing,” but many of them have faced similar obstacles.

A key problem is the difficulty of maintaining the privacy of the whistleblower. We at GlobaLeaks come from a strong information security background and have designed our platform to be as secure and privacy-preserving as possible.

The GlobaLeaks suite of software will empower people to stand up anonymously no matter what their definition of “whistleblowing” is. The person or organization running the software will be able to customize the platform to suit their needs. GlobaLeaks is designed with flexibility in mind, while enabling maximal privacy and security by default.

The technologies we use to guarantee the security and anonymity of communications are called Tor Hidden Services. These technologies protect both the computer that is sending the information and the server that receives it. Both the whistleblower and the server that gets the messages are as immune from retaliation attacks as possible.

Possible use cases of GlobaLeaks software

Read More...
http://www.globaleaks.org/

Interesting... Sounds like this Software could have many uses...

Don

GlobaLeaks is an open source project aimed to create a worldwide, anonymous, censorship-resistant, distributed whistleblowing platform.
globaleaks/GlobaLeaks · GitHub
GlobaLeaks: The Open Source Whistleblower Software | WebProNews
GlobaLeaks - Open Source Whistleblowing Framework

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