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Submitting documents anonymously Sources Protection and Anonymous Documents Submission Systems Atanas Tchobanov bivol.bg & balkanleaks.eu [email protected]

Submitting documents anonymously by Atanas Chobanov

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Submitting documents anonymously

Sources Protection and Anonymous Documents Submission Systems!

!Atanas Tchobanov !

bivol.bg & [email protected]

Why whistleblowing matters?

• Exposing officials misconduct;

• Bringing light to criminal behavior;

• Bringing critical information for corroborating investigative hypothesis;

• Protecting the public interest;

• Needs law & technology protection;

War on whistleblowers• Prosecution under the Espionage Act in US;

• World scale hunting (Snowden);

• Jail time sentences (Manning);

• Journalists under threat (NYTimes James Risen, The Guardian Glen Greenwald);

• Local case: the Bulgarian « Galeria » scandal.

Case study• FOIA access to a document exposing officials corruption

(« Misho The Beer » case) takes 2 years long judicial case;

• Whistleblower leaking takes 2 minutes;

Anonymous electronic submission challenges

• More dangerous then a « brown envelope »;

• Traceability resistance;

• Strong anonymity;

• Strong security;

• User friendly;

Old Systems

• cryptome.org online from 1996,

• 70000 files,

• PGP mail submissions,

• Run by John Young and Deborah Natsios;

The « Classic » System• wikileaks.org online from 2007;

• TOR submission, PGP mail submission, IRC chat, Brown envelope…;

• The TOR submission system died after the Julian Assange - Daniel Domscheit-Berg split;

• Close source, designed by a single person: The Architect;

WikiLeaks TOR submission

Whistleblower

Hidden Server

Covert traffic

Vaporware Systems

WikiLeaks followers• AnonLeaks.eu BalkanLeaks.eu BrusselsLeaks.eu

CorporateLeaks.org CrowdLeaks.com EnviroLeaks.org FrenchLeaks.org GlobaLeaks.org GreenLeaks.com GreenLeaks.org indoleaks.org jumboleaks.org LocaLeaks.com OpenLeaks.org PirateLeaks.cz QuebecLeaks.org RuLeaks.net ThaiLeaks.info tradeleaks.com TuniLeaks.appspot.com…

• Many followers, but… No leaks;

• balkanleaks.eu, named most successful WikiLeaks follower by Assange and some media (Forbes, Arstechnica).

BalkanLeaks Success StoriesMasonic lodge in the Judicial

SystemBelene NPP

report

The « Buddha »

Files

Censored by The Council of Europe…

Implementing SecureDrop• Aaron Swartz's Final Project;

• Supported by Freedom of the Press Foundation (USA);

• TOR based, PGP encryption;

• Adopted by The New Yorker, Forbes and others;

• Open source, Python;

Hardware & Software Challenges

• Affordability (two servers, a laptop, etc.) costs around $3,000;

• Needs competent IT staff;

• Needs comprehensive training for journalists (PGP skills, Local encryption/decryption);

Ongoing fundraising campaign by Freedom of the Press Foundation

The «AfterLeak» time• OK, we got « The MegaLeak » or the « MegaFOIA ».

Now what?

• Comprehensive indexing of millions of records: PDF, mails, etc;

• Using custom parsers and The Sphinx indexer;

• Sharing and searching the sensitive material.

The «AfterLeak» time• Case study: Searchable database of solicitation and

award notices from FBO.gov. obtained by Sunlight Foundation: https://bivol.bg/bivol_sunlight_search/

• Case study: Searchable database of leaked emails from the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSPLeaks): https://balkanleaks.eu/bspleaks

The  MIHALYA  project:  Javascript  Based  Encrypted  Data  Searching  Tool

• Full webapp embedded in index.html;!• Local input of user and pass. They never travel through the Net unencrypted;!• No data is travelling and stored without encryption;!• Search words are encrypted and the browser tries to retrieve the corresponding

index files/localstorage;!• If index file is found, it is decrypted in RAM. Index contains only pointers to the files

with data;!• Pointers are encrypted and there is a lookup for the corresponding data files; Files

are decrypted one at a time in RAM;!• In the server version index and data are cached in localstorage in encrypted form,

which speeds up and obfuscates the way it works;!• Works with tablets, iOS, Android.!• Github: https://github.com/bivol/Mihalya

The  MIHALYA  project

The  MIHALYA  project

• Addressing the Single Point of Failure problem;

• Distributed storage

Prospectives

• Distributed DHT Infrastructure (Delian Delchev): https://www.balkanleaks.eu/wld/

Running for The Big Leek

Thank You!