Crowdleak: A Secure Whistleblower Concept
Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Share this article with others in the tech community. We should explore developing decentralized platforms to enable whistleblowing and expose wrongdoing.
The thing that tripped up Julian Assange is that he was a single attack vector—a middleman between a sender and the media. Get that middleman and stop the project, they thought. And that’s just what they did.
What’s insidious about Assange’s treatment is that he was always the recipient of sensitive government secrets and unseemly private emails (Hilary Clinton) but never the sender. Yet he rots in Belmarsh prison, awaiting a miracle pardon.
What if there were a decentralized version of Wikileaks that would allow anonymous whistleblowers to upload sensitive or embarrassing information directly to a viewable blockchain?
The sensitive documents could be titled, tagged, and equipped with descriptions, then uploaded to a blockchain to be reviewed immediately by an army of investigators.
Here's a general overview of how such a system could work. Keep in mind that I’m not a techie.
1. Anonymity
Users would not need to provide personal identifying information when uploading documents to maintain anonymity. They could connect to the blockchain network anonymously, such as using a virtual private network (VPN) or the Tor network.
2. Document Encryption
Before uploading a document to the blockchain, the user would encrypt the document using a strong encryption algorithm like AES (Advanced Encryption Standard). The encryption key would be known only to the user, ensuring the document remains confidential.
3. Blockchain Upload
The encrypted document would then be uploaded to the blockchain as a transaction. Blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum allow for arbitrary data to be included in transactions, making it possible to store encrypted documents on-chain.
4. Public Verification
Once the transaction containing the encrypted document is included in a block and added to the blockchain, it becomes publicly viewable. However, since the document is encrypted, only the user with the encryption key can decrypt and view the original content.
5. Tamper Resistance
The immutable nature of blockchains ensures that once a document is uploaded, it cannot be altered or removed, providing a tamper-resistant record of the document's existence and timestamp.
The system would be maintained not by a person or company but by 1,000 software developers worldwide, with the blockchain sitting on thousands of nodes.
There is no way to determine the authenticity or provenance of an upload, so subsequent phases might include mechanisms for uploading counterevidence or challenging claims to authenticity.
To start with, though, whistleblowers would have new transparency tools that replace the Assange role with a censorship-resistant computing network.
So get busy, devs. We don’t have time to mess around with Bored Apes.
Even if all the kinks have not yet been worked out, this is a worthy objective.
My problem. I have experience with political secrets and whistleblowers, and often times, that information is factually wrong. This is also true even for investigative reporters. I have sat in rooms with people telling me awful things about their workplaces, and their information was incorrect.
And, for various reasons, no one will know the right story, or the whole story, so the consensual myths last for years. Knowing the inside story is exhilarating and addictive. But too often, people interpret information before they pass it on. Even if you think the info is cut-and-dried, black-and-white, it has been tainted with human opinion.
So, I could see the data in this model being easily corrupted And innocent people would be harmed. It takes time and effort to find the truth.
Given my concerns, I am a BIG fan of openthebooks.com. They are "a transparency group devoted to posting online all the disclosed spending of every level of government across the United States."
It is one place I donate to support a free society. One thing I like about them - what they do pretty much appeals to everyone, regardless of their political POV.
Anyway, I might be wrong. Would be interesting to view a proof of concept.