We are excited to announce the first four recipients of our next crowd-funding campaign, all of whom may now start receiving donations intended to cover the costs of installing SecureDrop, our open-source whistleblower submission system. The first round includes BalkanLeaks, the Government Accountability Project, Cryptome and Firedoglake. You can go here to make a donation.

Since we took over the SecureDrop project one year ago this month, we have helped over a dozen major news organizations install SecureDrop so that they may more securely receive information from anonymous sources. However, to properly run SecureDrop, organizations need to purchase approximately $3,000 worth of hardware that many smaller independent news organizations may not be able to afford. So we are focusing this crowd-funding effort on trying to help organizations dedicated to transparency who do great work, but who are in the most need.

In addition, the Glaser Progress Foundation, a non-profit that focuses on funding diverse and independent voices in the media, has graciously agreed to fund four additional news organizations that are members of the Media Consortium, a network of over 70 independent media outlets. Chosen in consultation with the Media Consortium, those four organizations will be: Truthout, Earth Island Journal, Mother Jones, and the Center for Media and Democracy, which runs PR Watch.

With our selections we are foremost trying to assist unique and independent journalism and transparency organizations that would most benefit from having SecureDrop. We will do at least two more rounds of crowd-funding after this round reaches its goal. In the next round, we will fund four international organizations. In the final round we will fund four organizations with specific subject specialities. We will announce the next round’s recipients shortly. Here is some more information about the organizations that are a part of the current round:

BalkanLeaks is a leading news and whistleblower website based in the Balkans, created to promote transparency and fight the nexus of organized crime and political corruption within the Balkan states. It was featured in WIRED reporter Andy Greenberg’s book This Machine Kills Secrets as the most successful WikiLeaks-like website.

The Government Accountability Project (GAP) is the nation’s leading whistleblower protection and advocacy organization. A non-partisan public-interest group, GAP litigates whistleblower cases, helps expose wrongdoing to the public, and actively promotes government and corporate accountability. Since its founding in 1977, GAP has helped over 6,000 whistleblowers.

Cryptome is a digital library created in 1996 by American independent scholars and architects John Young and Deborah Natsios. Cryptome welcomes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance—open, secret and classified documents—but not limited to those.

Firedoglake is an independent news site that first opened in 2004, devoted to covering issues of transparency, privacy, and social justice. FDL gained notoriety for its coverage of the Scooter Libby trial, and continued the tradition with daily coverage of whistleblower Chelsea Manning's trial. Most recently FDL has been reporting on the case of CIA torture whistleblower John Kiriakou and publishing his letters from Loretto prison.

You can go here to donate.

Also, don't forget: you can use our website to donate to WikiLeaks, the transparency journalism organization that pioneered the idea of a secure and anonymous whistleblower submission system.