Should whistleblowers trust Wall Street Journal’s ‘Safehouse’?

Forbes / Gawker
The Wall Street Journal has addressed some of the security flaws for Safehouse, which critics pointed out soon after the paper unveiled the anonymous document-leaking site. Still at issue is the site’s “terms of use,” which seem to leave a lot of room for the Journal to reveal leakers’ identities. Adrian Chen’s summary of the terms: “Go ahead and upload your explosive documents to SafeHouse. But if they publish a scoop based on your material and someone gets mad, they can sell you out to anyone for any reason.” The Journal says in a statement Friday that it will protect its sources as much as it legally can and that the language is supposed to let the company deal with “extraordinary circumstances.” || Keep trying: Dan Gillmor says the Journal should keep improving the site but notes, “There’s always going to be a question of how much a leaker should trust any private company on which a government can exert pressure.”