Sigh. What a nightmare.
Translation to English for the nontech savvy (and someone who only has limited time to peruse these threads)? TY
Have you seen this, https://freedom.press/news/tribute-james-dolan-co-creator-securedrop-who-has-tragically-passed-away-age-36/
“It was with an extremely heavy heart that we recently learned our friend and former colleague James Dolan—one of the co-creators of SecureDrop and Freedom of the Press Foundation’s first full time employee—took his own life over the holidays. He was 36.
“Beyond a couple references on our website, that New Yorker story is virtually all that is in the public domain about James’s involvement in the project—and that’s how he preferred it. James was an intensely private and modest person, and despite the fact the SecureDrop soon got a lot of attention when Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) took the project over, he constantly insisted that Aaron deserved all the credit.
Yet SecureDrop would not currently exist without James, and he deserves all the commendation in the world for making it what it is today.
In January 2013, Aaron Swartz himself committed suicide as the US government was attempting to prosecute him for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act related to allegedly copying academic articles from JSTOR. SecureDrop was an unrelated side project he was working on at the time. A few months after Aaron’s tragic death, Kevin Poulsen donated the SecureDrop project to FPF, in the hopes that we could revive it and get it in a place where more news organizations could use it.
At that point, James was literally the only person in the world who knew all the ins and outs of the system, how to install it, and how to make it better. He had a high-paying computer security job at a large company by then, but I asked him if he’d be willing to come work for us so we could try to get SecureDrop into more newsrooms. We had hardly any money at the time, yet he immediately agreed—even though it meant taking an 80% pay cut. (Later, he would even refuse to accept a raise, insisting that we use any new funding to hire additional people to work on the project instead.)”
So, now both of the founders of secure drop have committed suicide.
Here is some info on Aaron Schwartz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Ortiz#Personal_life
Prosecution of Aaron Swartz
Main article: United States v. Aaron Swartz
Ortiz’s office prosecuted computer programmer and Internet activist Aaron Swartz. In 2011, Swartz was arrested for unauthorized, bulk downloading of free articles from internet archive JSTOR, in violation of the JSTOR’s terms of use.[38][39][40] In a 2011 press release announcing Swartz’s indictment on federal charges, Ortiz said “stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars.” [41] After State Prosecutors dropped their charges, federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment adding nine more felony counts, which increased Swartz’s maximum criminal exposure to 50 years of imprisonment and $1 million in fines.
The prosecution brought by Ortiz involved what was characterized by numerous critics such as former White House Counsel John Dean as “overcharging” and “overzealous” prosecution for the alleged computer crimes.[42][43]
In all, prosecutors charged Swartz with 13 felony counts, despite the fact that both MIT and JSTOR had chosen not to pursue civil litigation; he faced 30 years’ imprisonment.[44] Swartz committed suicide on January 11, 2013,[45][46] before the case came to trial. More than 60,000 people petitioned the White House to remove Ortiz from office for “overreach.”[47][48][49][50] On January 15, 2013, following his suicide, all charges against Swartz were dropped.[45][46] The next day, Ortiz issued a statement saying that her office had never intended to seek maximum penalties against Aaron Swartz.[51]
Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly published an op-ed piece by Massachusetts criminal defense attorney Harvey Silverglate about the case. He said attorneys familiar with the case had told him the Middlesex County District Attorney’s office had planned for Swartz’s case to be “continued without a finding, with Swartz duly admonished and then returned to civil society to continue his pioneering electronic work in a less legally questionable manner.”[52][53] “Under such a disposition,” Silverglate later told CNET’s Declan McCullagh, “the charge is held in abeyance (”continued”) without any verdict (”without a finding”). The defendant is on probation for a period of a few months up to maybe a couple of years at the most; if the defendant does not get into further legal trouble, the charge is dismissed, and the defendant has no criminal record. This is what the lawyers expected to happen when Swartz was arrested. But then the feds took over....”[53] “Tragedy intervened,” Silverglate wrote, “when Ortiz’s office took over the case to send ‘a message’.”[52]
Boston’s WBUR reported that Ortiz was expected to testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s probe into the handling of the Aaron Swartz case.[42] The Department of Justice gave a private briefing about the case to the House Committee, and subsequently, in March 2013, Attorney General Eric Holder defended Ortiz’s aggressive prosecution before the Senate Judiciary Committee, terming it, “a good use of prosecutorial discretion.”
So between John Perry Barlow, Aaron Schwartz and James Dolan three people connected to Secure Drop have died. (two suicides, James Dolan killed himself in December of 2017.)
You bring so much information to these threads. Thank you so much.
There has been people submitting stuff to these secure drops, including Wiki Leaks that have later died or suicide. Speculation that the Black Hats were identifying them some how.