By Owen Heimsoth | USA

A whistleblower is defined as “a person who exposes any kind of information or activity that is deemed illegal, unethical, or not correct within an organization that is either private or public.”

Whistleblowing is pretty much illegal in the USA, but GlobaLeaks want to protect those who would like to leak the information they have.

The purpose is to bring together thousands of home computers together into one leaking network, allowing for anyone to come to the table and share any information they may have quickly and anonymously. They use Tor Hidden Sources to ensure the user is anonymous and Tor2Web to reach the public internet.

Once somebody submits information, it is encrypted using PGP and it is sent out to those meant to receive it. The information is immediately deleted from the GlobaLeaks platform after this takes place.

GlobaLeaks was developed by Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights and released in September 2011. They call themselves “a worldwide distributed leak amplification network.” There are six creators behind the software, all of them are based in Italy and the Netherlands.

Fabio Pietrosanti, a GlobaLeaks spokesperson, said in a Forbes interview that “GlobaLeaks doesn’t have any central point of failure so it may be less vulnerable to cyber and legal attacks that WikiLeaks has faced.”

The Hermes Center website says, “Our mission is to promote and develop in the society the awareness of and the attention to transparency and accountability, be they related to the society-at-large or not. Our goal is to increase the citizens’ involvement in the management of matters of public interest and to boost the active participation of workers and employees to the correct management of corporations and companies they work for.”

Image from Globaleaks.