Edward Snowden is a prime example of how to handle it.
Only communicated via encrypted channels.
When revealing himself and his leak, he had already left his home country. He was trying to make it to South America when the US canceled his passport. US went so far as to bring down a sovereign nations Presidential plane to search it for Snowden.
I’m sure he has still had to worry about his personal safety after getting stuck in a country he wasn’t planning on getting stuck in.
But the reality is you have to meticulously plan and basically abandon your entire life and move somewhere they cannot touch you. When it comes to US companies, you generally will have to do like Snowden and avoid US-allied nations.
See also: Steven Donziger and Chevron
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Donziger
Donziger was placed under house arrest in August 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of criminal contempt of court, which arose during his appeal against Kaplan’s RICO decision, when he refused to turn over electronic devices he owned to Chevron’s forensics experts. In July 2021, US District Judge Loretta Preska found him guilty, and Donziger was sentenced to 6 months in jail in October 2021. While Donziger was under house arrest in 2020, twenty-nine Nobel laureates described the actions taken by Chevron against him as “judicial harassment.” Human rights campaigners called Chevron’s actions an example of a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP). In April 2021, six members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus demanded that the Department of Justice review Donziger’s case. In September 2021, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights stated that the pre-trial detention imposed on Donziger was illegal and called for his release. Having spent 45 days in prison and a combined total of 993 days under house arrest, Donziger was released on April 25, 2022.
US corporations can and will bring the weight of the US “justice” system on whistleblowers. The US is not unique in this regard. Whatever giant company you’re whistleblowing against, you better GTFO of the country they are based in.
Yeah so many people talk about Snowden going to Russia and ignore the fact that he was only in Russia transferring to another plane when his passport was cancelled stranding him there. The choice was basically stay there, or go back to the US, and that wasn’t really an option.
Why the US would want to leave him in Russia as a potential asset for Russian intelligence to break instead of letting him get to a different country that isn’t such a direct threat though is a really good question.
Take the advice offered by journalists on how to contact them privately and avoid getting caught. I.e. secure and protect evidence without raising suspicion. Contact a reputable journalist via some secure means of communication. Let them take over and keep silent. Don’t brag or something.
Most good newspapers offer something like PGP encrypted mail, SecureDrop over TOR and more to talk to them.
Encrypt email with anyone who publishes a key. If “bad” emails are the only ones you encrypt, then that metadata can be used to raise suspicion of you and to trace your contacts.
This children is why the need for private communication isn’t something you can laugh away by claiming you have nothing to hide.
Absolutely. There are many reasons, but attacks on journalists/whistleblowers and the malicious potential of collated data in a capitalist oligarchy are the first two that come to mind.
how’d you find the guy?
Easy. We had a list of the fifteen or so guys that did that specific part of the job, we got their IP addresses, watched them for a while, and as it turns out, two of them regularly use a VPN and send all of their traffic to Canada.
How long do you think it would take to figure out whether or not which one of these boys are harmless software pirates, or their man?
People do all of the work in the world without knowing that your preparation will blow your cover.
Have you ever visited TailsOS’s website off of a VPN? Could the Feds find out? Do you think the other guys have the same level of deniability?
That trail is not washing off. You even knowing or having a history of using a Linux iso is suspicion enough if the rest of the suspects are all boring chuds.
Is this some leet hacker fantasy where you are persecuted for using Linux? Lemmy you never disappoint lmao
You need at least 7 proxies.
Not even, it’s just comparing you to the average joe.
Who’s more suspicious? The dude who visits GitHub, has a Matrix account and visits the arch wiki every six months or the dude who mostly sticks to Facebook talking to his family?
FBI: …I don’t see anything
Yeah right.
That was meant to be a joke. Wasn’t the whole “7 proxies” a meme back in the day?
Yeah but Lemmy is full of wankers and it’s hard to tell who’s wanking.
Fair.
While it won’t help you getting suicided, setting up a deadman’s switch on the cloud that will release your testimony is definitely worth doing.
With whistleblower information, why hold it back in the first place? Wouldn’t it be better to release it immediately if they might kill you either way?
Collect all your evidence into one large archive, upload it somewhere and make it known that if you die of anything other than natural causes, that information will become available to EVERYONE.
Read up on how “dead man’s switches” work. If you don’t send a signal online, log into a particular account on a regular basis, that sends the release signal.
Related:
But why bother holding back in the first place. If this is whistleblower information like Boeing safety issues, there’s no point in setting up a dead man’s switch. You want to release it all immediately in the first place, because keeping it to yourself undermines the point of blowing the whistle
