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Strongbox – A method for you to share tips, information, and files (newyorker.com)
54 points by simas on April 2, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 19 comments



It looks like Kevin Poulsen is involved? Given that he helped Adrian Lamo turn Chelsea (Bradley) Manning over to the feds for passing info to WikiLeaks, I'm not so sure how his involvement in StrongBox...

http://www.salon.com/2010/12/27/wired_5/


Fair play to them for providing the service and here's hoping it leads to further exposure of corruption and wrongdoing.

The next step, however, is getting people to actually act on the information that comes out which is appearing to be an absolute goliath of a challenge.


I work at the New Yorker. If you have any questions, please reach out!

Leonard_bogdonoff@newyorker.com


This is a really good idea. Bravo.


How is this going?

Are people really sending you good material through this system?


Considering the nature of the system, I doubt they're going to state if/when/how many they are receiving.


We do get a lot of submissions. Only a small number of them are applicable.


http://strngbxhwyuu37a3.onion/ seems to be offline (only checked with Tor Browser)


We heard about a recent but with the installation, so we took it offline. It will be coming up again soon.


SecureDrop is now kind of famous for being a secure way to exchange information between sources and journalists; we can all applaud its efforts for lowering the bar of high-risk investigation journalism.

Does anyone know whethe SecureDrop has ever been successfully used by journalists, and if there are any feedback about it ?


You mean, other than the recently discovered backdoor?

http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2015/Apr/8


That reads like an April Fool's joke, but I followed the link to Github, and this has been acknowledged (and fixed) as a "security-high vulnerability":

https://github.com/freedomofpress/securedrop/pull/974


I thought this was the project that aaronsw started awhile back? Is it coming back to life?


What's the difference between StrongBox and SecureDrop? Does StrongBox use the latest version of SecureDrop? Is it a custom version? Or just a different brand name?


StrongBox is the New Yorker's implementation of the SecureDrop software. Strongbox was developed by Aaron Swartz, Kevin Poulsen and the New Yorker and then later open-sourced as SecureDrop.

Here's an article from the launch in 2013. (I'm not sure why this is just making it on to HN now.)

http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/introducing-stron...


From the page linked: "Please note: general fiction, poetry, art, and PR submissions sent via Strongbox will not be assessed."


The title (currently "The New Yorker protects your anonymity using Tor") is fairly misleading. The New Yorker is not protecting their reader's anonymity with tor (or at least the page does not provide any claims to that effect). The linked page describes their use of SecureDrop[0], which is only accessable via tor, for folks submitting tips, leaks, and another sensitive information.

[0] https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/securedrop


They also say "Strongbox does not provide perfect security," which they should probably take out of the footnote and place higher up.


Thanks, we updated the title.




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