本文探讨了建立分布式举报流程以降低个人风险的方法。作者认为，传统的举报方式（如维基解密或斯诺登泄密）会带来巨大的个人风险，而降低风险可以提高组织透明度，并迫使组织为其保密行为付出代价。文章重点讨论了潜在问题和解决方案，包括硬盘死信箱的协调、文档审查指南、开源网络爬虫、以及用于共享提取的纯文本和嵌入的标准格式。作者强调需要与实际处理过举报人的人合作，验证所有假设，并最终确定是否专注于重要组织的举报工作。

📢 传统举报方式的个人风险：作者指出，如维基解密或斯诺登泄密等传统举报方式会给举报人带来巨大的个人风险。

💾 降低风险的重要性：降低个人风险可以提高组织透明度，迫使组织为其保密行为付出代价，这对于缺乏成员信任的组织尤为重要。

💡 潜在解决方案：文章提出了多种解决方案，包括协调硬盘死信箱、制定文档审查指南、开发开源网络爬虫、以及标准化共享提取纯文本和嵌入的格式。

🌐 分布式社交媒体的挑战：作者认为构建分布式社交媒体过于复杂，更易于被政治力量操控；因此，建议采用分布式爬取和镜像集中式网站的方式，以确保信息的长期可访问性。

⚖️ 法律与伦理考量：文章强调需要根据不同国家的情况制定指南，并考虑法律因素。此外，还讨论了是否应该专注于重要组织（如从事情报研究的公司）的举报工作，以及这是否会导致长期的“人类繁荣”。

Published on April 12, 2025 6:36 AM GMT

2025-04-12

DISCLAIMER

This document is written quickly and contains opinions I may change quickly, as I get new info.This document contains politically sensitive info that I might take down in future.

In short this document describes how to setup distributed whisteblowing processes to reduce personal risk for everyone involved in the process. Typically whisteblowing (such as with wikileaks or snowden leaks) incurs significant personal risk. Reducing personal risk may ensure it is highly likely to happen when an org doesn't have complete trust of all its members, forcing them to pay a secrecy tax (in Assange's words) relative to orgs that do have complete trust and/or higher levels of transparency.

Potential problems

Low-attention regime
Whistleblower sends documents to Bob via SecureDrop server or via hard disk dead drop
PROBLEM: good infra, protocols, incentives to coordinate hard disk dead drops don't exist, especially if trying to use multiple hops to reach destinationIMO hard disk dead drops are better than using Tor + tails + PGP, as of 2025
Bob does redaction and releases torrent of the documents to public. Uses Tor and shares torrent link on some message boards like 4chan.
PROBLEM: need public guidelines on redaction, so anyone can do it (i.e. become Bob)PROBLEM: for leaked docs/videos that are not especially high-stakes (such as govt classified docs), it might be okay to just publish the redacted docs/videos on a website at this stage. Website must be hard-but-not-impossible to censor. for instance 4chan for docs or rumble for video. Unsure which existing websites are best suited for this use case.
High-attention regime
Mirror a searchable version of docs to thousands of servers immediately
PROBLEM: need open source web crawler to crawl entire internet including any leaked docs/videosOR: PROBLEM: need a standard protocol to only crawl websites and torrents that claim to have leaked docs on them (maybe they include a special flag in their readme/robots.txt, and some cryptographic proof-of-work to prove they're not spam)PROBLEM: need open source plaintext extraction and embedding generation so that along with the raw html crawls (WARC), the plaintext and embeddings are also circulated in the same torrent. need standardised format (WARC-parquet?) that keeps some metadata just like WARC keeps metadata.
A popular media website publishes it to increase public attention
Popular media website will do document verification. I'm assuming they won't face any significant challenge with this.
Decentralised social media to discuss the document
PROBLEM: need open source crawling and mirroring crawls of all social mediaI think actually doing distributed social media is too hard. Complexity of app ensures software developers who write the app are politically co-optible. What's easier to do is have distributed crawling and mirroring of a centralised site, so people in future can still view the consensus reached by users of the social media. If it ever gets taken down, someone can get a new server running (does not have to have content of old one).

Summary of potential solutions

coordination for hard disk dead drops, including multi-hop hard disk dead dropsredaction guidelinesopen source web crawling
flags and proof-of-work to only crawl some websitescrawl and mirror leaked docs. crawl and mirror social media discussions.
open source plaintext extraction, embedding generation
standardise format to share extracted plaintext and embeddings
guidelines for latest hard-to-censor social media
to publish torrent link, maybe raw docs, and social media discussionsguidelines must be country-wise and include legal considerations. always use a social media of a country different from the country where leak happened.
country-wise torrents (not sure if this is needed)
torrents proposed above are illegal in all countries. instead we can legally circulate country A's secrets via torrent within country B and legally circulate country B's secrets via torrent within country A. only getting the info past the border is illegal, for that again need securedrop or hard disk dead drop.have to think more about who publishes the legal torrents

IMPORTANT: Need feedback from people who have actually worked with whistleblowers, to validate all hypotheses listed above.

IMPORTANT: Need to decide whether whisteblowing of important orgs (such as companies/labs researching intelligence, and national/intl intelligence agencies) is actually what I want to work on.

Crux: Does this lead to longterm human flourishing or not?Narrowed crux: Would orgs developing intelligence (superintelligent AI, human genetic engg, BCIs etc) necessarily be trustworthy if there existed lots of public information about both their capabilities and their values?
Leaked info about values means public can decide if the company represents their true values. i.e. control via democracy instead of via market.Leaked info about capabilities means public can coordinate under a different leader to shut down existing org and setup a different org.
This requires complete global surveillance (public information) and inter-govt coordination if the open sourced capabilities include offense-beats-defence weaponry deployable by small groups (such as bioweapons, nanotech weapons, etc).Seems difficult to find a solution that can leak info about values of an org without also leaking info about capabilities of the org. Above proposed solutions will obviously leak both.More narrowed crux: Lots of lesswrong crowd defers to yudkowsky's mental priors against open source bioweapons and complete surveillance (public info). Will have to write separate post on this.

Discuss