{"id":59012,"date":"2015-06-01T12:00:22","date_gmt":"2015-06-01T11:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=59012"},"modified":"2015-05-31T18:42:24","modified_gmt":"2015-05-31T17:42:24","slug":"first-look-publishes-open-source-code-to-advance-privacy-security-and-journalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/06\/first-look-publishes-open-source-code-to-advance-privacy-security-and-journalism\/","title":{"rendered":"First Look Publishes Open Source Code to Advance Privacy, Security and Journalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"firstlook-code-article-display-b<\/a><\/p>\n

27 May 2015 – The Intercept<\/em> and its publisher, First Look Media, strongly believe in the benefits of free and open source software \u2014 in part because we rely on such software every day. To keep our journalists and sources safe, we use secure communication tools like the data-encryption system GnuPG, the Off-the-Record secure messaging protocol, the SecureDrop communications platform and the secure calling and texting app Signal. To publish on the web, we use the GNU\/Linux operating system; the Apache web server; OpenSSL, a web encryption library; WordPress, the open-source blogging engine; and Piwik, which tracks web traffic. The list goes on.<\/p>\n

We greatly appreciate the hard work of developers who give away their code to benefit the internet and the world. And today we\u2019re excited to contribute back to the open source\u00a0community by launching First Look Code<\/a>, the home for our own open source projects related to privacy, security, data, and journalism. To begin with, First Look Code is the new home for document sanitization software PDF Redact Tools<\/a>, and we\u2019ve launched a brand\u00a0new anti-gag order project called AutoCanary<\/a>.<\/p>\n

PDF Redact Tools<\/strong><\/p>\n

When The Intercept<\/em> first launched, part of my job involved redacting documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden before publishing them. Because we didn\u2019t want to inadvertently publish sensitive information we\u2019d intended to redact \u2014\u00a0as no less cautious an institution than The New York Times<\/em> once did<\/a>\u00a0\u2014\u00a0I developed PDF Redact Tools, a simple command-line program for Mac OS X and Linux that helps with redacting, stripping metadata, and sanitizing PDFs in preparation for publishing.<\/p>\n

AutoCanary<\/strong><\/p>\n

A warrant canary is a regularly published statement that a company hasn\u2019t received any legal orders that it\u2019s not allowed to talk about, such as a national security letter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Canaries can help prevent web publishers from misleading visitors and prevent\u00a0tech companies from misleading users when they share data with the government and are\u00a0prevented from talking about it. One such situation arose \u2014 without a canary in place \u2014 in 2013, when the U.S. government sent Lavabit, a provider of encrypted email services apparently\u00a0used by Snowden,\u00a0a legal request to access Snowden\u2019s email<\/a>, thwarting some of the very privacy protections Lavabit\u00a0had promised users. This request included a gag order, so the company was legally prohibited from talking about it. Rather than becoming \u201ccomplicit in crimes against the American people,\u201d in his\u00a0words<\/a>,\u00a0Lavabit founder Ladar Levison, chose to shut down\u00a0the\u00a0service.<\/p>\n

Warrant canaries are designed to help\u00a0companies in this kind of situation. You can see a list of companies that publish warrant canary statements at Canary Watch<\/a>. As of today, First Look Media is among the companies that publish canaries<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re happy\u00a0to announce the first version of AutoCanary, a desktop program for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux that makes the process of generating machine-readable, digitally-signed warrant canary statements simpler.<\/p>\n

____________________________________<\/p>\n

Read more about PDF Redact Tools<\/a> on its new website.<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more about AutoCanary<\/a> on its new website.<\/em><\/p>\n

Email the author: micah.lee@theintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 firstlook.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

27 May 2015 – The Intercept and its publisher, First Look Media, strongly believe in the benefits of free and open source software \u2014 in part because we rely on such software every day. To keep our journalists and sources safe, we use secure communication tools.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whistleblowing-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59012\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}