While Aaron’s commitment to government transparency was less known to the public, it’s a subject in which his passion and innovation were just as evident. He was prolific user of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which MuckRock founder Michael Morisy eloquently described last year. But Aaron was also aware of the shortcomings of FOIA, and as one of his last projects before his death, he created an open-source whistleblower system that could be installed by any news organization to anonymously accept documents from sources.

Freedom of the Press Foundation was honored to have taken over management of that project, now known as SecureDrop, in the fall of 2013. We’ve tried to make Aaron proud by making significant upgrades to the system in the past few months. Much of those upgrades stemmed from a hackathon that was held in Aaron’s honor in November. It was so successful, we are hosting another one at MIT on January 25th, which will be open to the public.

We hope we can do Aaron’s legacy justice by continuing to improve SecureDrop and spreading the technology as far as possible. We'll be helping news organizations in the United States and all over the world install it throughout 2014.

If you want to honor Aaron, many of the same groups that helped stop SOPA—including Demand Progress, the group he founded—are calling for a day-of-action advocating for NSA reform on February. They are asking everyone to call their representatives to demand they reign in NSA surveillance that threatens so much of the privacy and press freedom many Americans take for granted.

As Aaron once said, "Transparency can be a powerful thing, but not in isolation. So, let’s stop passing the buck by saying our job is just to get the data out there and it’s other people’s job to figure out how to use it. Let’s decide that our job is to fight for good in the world."