GlobaLeaks
 |
|
| Developer(s) | Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights |
|---|---|
| Initial release | 6 September 2011 |
| Stable release |
2.65.15 / 30 January 2017
|
| Repository | https://github.com/globaleaks/GlobaLeaks |
| Written in | Python, JavaScript |
| Operating system | Linux |
| License | Affero General Public License |
| Website | https://www.globaleaks.org/ |
GlobaLeaks is an open-source, free software intended to enable secure and anonymous whistleblowing initiatives. It was developed by the Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights, an Italian based NGO supporting freedom of speech online.
The software empowers anyone, even non-technical people, to easily setup and maintain a whistleblowing platform.
The project concept was initiated by Fabio Pietrosanti and shared for the first time within the hacktivist community on 15 December 2010.
Relevant figures in the first development are Claudio Agosti, Arturo Filastò, Michele Orrù and Giovanni Pellerano.
The first prototype was announced on 6 September 2011 on the Full disclosure mailing list.
Asked by an interviewer on how the GlobaLeaks project began, Filastò explained: "After the whole Cablegate drama we decided to work on this."
Filastò and his partners noted that most leaksites "had poor security," with the vulnerabilities of the Wall Street Journal’s whistleblowing dropbox SafeHouse, for instance, being "exposed only hours after it went online." Filastò commented that: "We saw that there is a user base but the developers were doing it wrong. We said: ‘we are security people, we can do this better’. So two years ago we came up with an advanced prototype: Globaleaks 0.1. It was an initial experiment but it went quite well. We then redid it from scratch and we’re now at version 2.24.".
In 2011, Tor2web, Tor Hidden Service proxy designed by Aaron Swartz, became part of the GlobaLeaks project as a component intended for extending platforms reachability to traditional HTTPS connections.
In 2012, the Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights NGO was founded in Italy.
In October 2013, Tessel Renzenbrink wrote in her article "Building an Infrastructure for Whistleblowing" that "there are very few protection mechanisms in place for whistleblowers," and that because of this, "whistleblowing featured as an important topic at OHM2013, the biggest outdoor hacker festival in Europe." At the festival, Renzenbrink spoke with people from "several organizations that have started initiatives to build a better whistleblowing infrastructure," including Filastò, who told her: "Globaleaks is a software designed to allow anybody to easily set up a whistleblower site". Filastò emphasized that "It is open source software so anybody can download it, install it and have a whistleblower site set up. (...) we don’t run a whistleblowing platform ourselves (...) but we contribute to this ecosystem by enabling other people to run successful initiatives."
...
Wikipedia