Aaron Swartz’s last gift to journalism and online privacy finds a new home

Before Aaron Swartz's suicide in January, he had nearly completed work with Wired's Kevin Poulsen on a secure system to accept messages and documents from anonymous sources over the Internet. The result of that effort was DeadDrop, an open-source python platform. The system assigns each source a unique code name so that a relationship can be established without news organizations ever knowing the source's identity.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation announced it will be taking over the project, renaming it SecureDrop and providing on-site installation for news organizations along with ongoing technical support. Trevor Timm, the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said that the anonymity made possible by the project is all the more important in light of recent NSA revelations and prosecutions against whistleblowers, which he believes "have shown the grave challenges to this relationship and the lengths governments will go to undermine it."