Julian Assange is home in Australia thanks to a very, very large Bitcoin (BTC) donation.
While Bitcoin proved invaluable to Assange, crypto could offer a lot more than just funds — enabling decentralized storage networks for archiving, secure identity management for establishing trust, and safer communication for information dissemination. These are practical applications that can improve reporting and help whistleblowers avoid loss of work, crushing legal battles or, worse, jail cells.
After striking a plea deal with United States authorities, Assange's last hurrah with the U.S. legal system would take place in the territory of the Northern Mariana Islands. Just one problem — flights to a remote enclave of islands in the Western Pacific Ocean are expensive. Miraculously, a single Bitcoin donation covered nearly the entire cost, delivering Assange back to Australia debt-free.
This wasn’t the first time Assange received major support from the crypto community, with AssangeDAO raising $53 million to help cover his legal fees back in 2022. But surely crypto can offer whistleblowers something more than lump sum donations.
The tech that gets us there
Although whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange have successfully delivered reports to the public without especially sophisticated technology, it came with enormous personal sacrifice. A user-facing app that unifies certain decentralized protocols and networks could make it simpler and safer for whistleblowers to gather, share and disseminate evidence for reports in the future.
Archiving applications, such as OpenArchive’s Safe, already allow users to document and store evidence using decentralized backends. With Safe, decentralized archivist communities can leverage Filecoin and IPFS to gather and store evidence of wrongdoing in countries like Mexico — such as electoral violence and ‘disappearing’ people (there are at least 105,000 missing people in the country). While Safe is not a Web3 app or protocol, they have integrated decentralized storage into an app designed to help people expose injustices.
Integrations can go deeper than this — but they haven’t been built (yet). The protocols and networks that could be integrated are being built, though, and in some cases they’re quite mature.
Permawebs, such as Arweave, can be used to create data records that are not only decentralized, but immutable. This is useful for tamper-proof reporting — preventing evidence from being altered or destroyed once it’s uploaded.
Adding to this, self-sovereign identity projects, like Sovrin, allow for a simple and verifiable way to prove identity. For example, this gives whistleblowers the ability to prove they actually work for (and therefore have access to information about) the organisation they’re reporting on.
These approaches are vastly superior to current methods of messenger Know-Your-Customer, such as requiring a phone number on sign-up. This is because it allows the whistleblower to share their identity with just the journalist (who may be protected by source confidentiality laws), and not the platform itself. In the past, we’ve seen metadata from encrypted chat apps used to prosecute whistleblowers, such as in the case of WhatsApp and Natalie Edwards — a former Treasury Department official convicted of leaking information to BuzzFeed.
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On top of all of these layers, zero-knowledge proofs and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), pioneered by projects like Zama, allow us to verify the information required for a report without needing open access to everything. For example, a whistleblower could prove they work for an organisation without revealing their name.
Imagine an all-in-one whistleblower front-end that integrated each of these technologies. A whistleblower could anonymously sign-up, encrypt evidentiary files using FHE, store them in their personal in-app archive using the Arweave, connect with a journalist, trustlessly verify each other’s identity, and start anonymously sharing evidence.
Even if the whistleblower stops responding or the chat is completely destroyed, the journalist will still have access to the files. They can compute a statistical summary of the report without requiring direct access to other private or confidential information — or metadata identifying the whistleblower. If the case ends up in court, the journalist couldn’t name the whistleblower.
Because Web3 is built to be interoperable, we should be able to fit these puzzle pieces together and create a functional crypto-based stack for whistleblowers.
In some places, major organisations, like banks, are required to provide infrastructure and protections for whistleblowers. If we want to protect the whistleblowers of the future, we should be on the front foot advocating for and building decentralized, crypto-first solutions for information gathering and reporting.