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VICE News Now Has SecureDrop for Confidential Sources

Anyone wishing to maintain anonymity when sending VICE Media tips and documents can now use SecureDrop, a proven tool that utilizes Tor and PGP Encryption.

At VICE News and Motherboard, we depend heavily on tips, leaks, and documents from confidential sources to inform our reporting on a wide-range of important issues. And protecting the identities of those sources is a critical part of our job.

To ensure that our sources can communicate with our reporters anonymously and securely, and to minimize the chance that anyone — even us — would ever be able to identify those sources, we're launching the VICE Media SecureDrop. This tool, which uses the Tor network and PGP encryption, allows new and existing sources to communicate with us and send us documents discreetly.

SecureDrop is straightforward to use; instructions are available at our landing page. Please follow the instructions carefully to protect your anonymity. When sending us anything, feel free to note if your communication is aimed at a specific person or publication at VICE. We will ensure that it reaches the correct parties in a safe and secure fashion.

SecureDrop is the safest and best option to protect against interception, online tracking, and the prying eyes of the government. Indeed, the need for a SecureDrop was sparked by many of the recent leak prosecutions in the United States, and it has been proven effective at news organizations like the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the New Yorker.

"Sources have been investigated because authorities are able to retrieve both metadata and content of communications from third parties like email and phone providers in secret," according to the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which runs SecureDrop and helped install the system for VICE. "SecureDrop attempts to completely eliminate third parties from the equation so that news organizations can challenge any legal orders that are served on them before handing over any data. SecureDrop also substantially limits the metadata trail that may exist from journalist-source communications in the first place."

Visit our SecureDrop landing page at vicenews.com/securedrop.