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Journalists and lawyers, who, among other things, help hold powerful actors accountable to the public in either the courtroom or the newsroom, must protect the confidentiality of their anonymous sources and their clients.Mass surveillance makes this vital obligation nearly impossible to fulfill.According to a new report from Human Rights Watch called With Liberty to Monitor All, in an age where governments are systematically pulling the curtains on all electronic communications, lawyers and journalists are trying to yank them back, and in doing so are forced to act like enemies of the state: journalists say they feel “like spies”; lawyers, like “drug dealers.”

Lawyers are legally bound, and journalists ethically bound, to protect the confidentiality of their respective clients and sources for the simple fact that if they don’t, they can’t do their jobs properly. Most people who have access to sensitive (but not necessarily classified) information that is in the public’s interest to know, won’t be inclined to share that information with journalists if they think they could lose their jobs or go to jail. People who should speak with their lawyers won’t do so if they think that the government is listening to what they say, and lawyers may not thoroughly investigate an issue if the government can monitor who they speak to.

At a time of increasingly panoramic visibility, confidentiality may be an empty promise. But promise it journalists and lawyers must. To keep it, they employ strategies that are as dramatically subversive as they are ultimately futile. They fly across the world to meet sources and clients in person. They use encrypted email. They don’t use email at all. They use burner phones. They don’t use phones at all. They produce documents on air-gapped computers. They don’t remove any documents from heavily secured offices.