Image courtesy WSJ from wsjsafehouse.com
The Wall Street Journal yesterday announced the launch of ‘SafeHouse‘ their proprietary, in-house document submission portal, modelled after Wikileaks, it would appear.
WSJ offers the following explanation of Safehouse:
Documents and databases: They’re key to modern journalism. But they’re almost always hidden behind locked doors, especially when they detail wrongdoing such as fraud, abuse, pollution, insider trading, and other harms. That’s why we need your help.If you have newsworthy contracts, correspondence, emails, financial records or databases from companies, government agencies or non-profits, you can send them to us using the SafeHouse service.
Unlike WikiLeaks, however, SafeHouse doesn’t guarantee the anonymity of their sources, as acknowledged in their Terms of Service:
You understand that regardless of the method of submission, we are unable to ensure the complete confidentiality or anonymity of anything you send to us. As a result, please use discretion in contacting us and providing us with information. You use this service at your own risk.
Compare this to the submission guidelines from WikiLeaks:
Wikileaks does not record any source-identifying information and there are a number of mechanisms in place to protect even the most sensitive submitted documents from being sourced. We do not keep any logs. We can not comply with requests for information on sources because we simply do not have the information to begin with. Similarly we can not see your real identity in any anonymised chat sessions with us. Our only knowledge of you as a source is if you provide a coded name to us. A lot of careful thought by world experts in security technologies has gone into the design of these systems to provide the maximum protection to you. Wikileaks has never revealed a source.
Or the sumission guidelines from Al Jazeera’s Transparency Unit, a secure content submission portal:
We recognize that – despite the best technology – our readers and viewers are taking a risk by submitting materials, particularly those living in countries where such disclosures are not protected by law. Our journalists will ensure that the identities of our sources are protected, and that submissions are scrubbed of sensitive information – like the “metadata” that contains authoring information – before those submissions are released to the public.
This is not to suggest that submission portals to major media outlets don’t have their place – obviously, it is critical that they provide as many options as possible for data collection. Now more than ever, data is the bread and butter of news media. From the perspective of a potential ‘leak,’ however, there are some significant differences between the offerings on hand from Al Jazeera or the WSJ and what a service like WikiLeaks delivers.
While WikiLeaks copycats have sprung from the woodwork (see here for a partial list), I believe that Al Jazeera and the WSJ are the only major media outlets to have launched dedicated, WikiLeaks-style submission portals for the public (please feel free to correct me on this!).