I will speaking (remotely) at the Qubes OS Summit 2026 at the end of October: Making Qubes and SecureDrop better, together. Here's the abstract: SecureDrop uses Qubes OS to power its next-generation journalist workstation because of its strong security properties. Over the years we have developed a good working relationship…
I want to brag about a bit of YAML code I wrote back in March for SecureDrop's completed migration to Ubuntu Noble that I neglected to mention in the blog post explaining the technical details. Yes, YAML, is a programming language. We offered SecureDrop Administrators the option for a "semiautomated"…
For the past two weeks, we've been putting out SecureDrop point releases that, as the title gives away, upgraded the underlying server's entire operating system. Definitely the kind of change you expect when upgrading from 2.12.3 to 2.12.4. (An alternative title for this post could've been "Committing semver crimes" —…
SecureDrop team member Kunal Mehta demo’d the SecureDrop Workstation at RightsCon 2025 on Feb. 25. You can watch a recording of the talk; the slides (PDF) are also available. In the demo, Mehta explained the multiyear project to provide better and more streamlined tools for journalists to safely handle potentially…
Since its first version, SecureDrop has run on the Ubuntu Server operating system. Ubuntu provides security fixes and updates for each long-term support release for five years; SecureDrop currently uses Ubuntu 20.04 “Focal.” As of May 2025, that version will no longer be supported, so all servers must migrate to…
Over the past month, Freedom of the Press Foundation has received significant interest in newsrooms setting up SecureDrop. Our open source whistleblower submission system is already used around the globe by large media organizations, small nonprofit newsrooms, and everything in between. We’re excited to see more adoption of SecureDrop. To…
I recently completed my third year working on SecureDrop at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Time flies when you're having fun; and not coincidentally, this is the longest I've ever held the same position at a job. In terms of numbers, by the end of 2024, I had made…
I'll be attending RustConf in Montreal this week so I wanted to take a moment to describe how we're using Rust in SecureDrop. Historically SecureDrop has always been a primarily Python project accompanied by bash scripts and then HTML/CSS/JS for the web interface. Aaron Swartz's first commit to SecureDrop was…
As the SecureDrop team previously announced, we’re shifting our focus in order to graduate SecureDrop Workstation from its pilot phase. One of the first steps we’ve taken in this direction is to reorganize and consolidate the project's Git repositories to make development and releases easier and faster. In summary: The…
I am privileged to work for a non-profit organization, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which allows me to work full-time on free and open-source software, namely SecureDrop. It also pays the bills and lets me spend me free time doing other stuff that's good for humanity, like contributing to…
I haven't been very good with writing about what I've been working on in SecureDrop-land, but here is: Migrating SecureDrop’s PGP backend from GnuPG to Sequoia over on the SecureDrop website. You should read it, and then come back to read the rest of this. We had been discussing Sequoia…
