Whistleblower, or just a snitch? (Image: Sven Paustian/Plainpicture)

PSST, wanna know a secret? You’ll just have to give me some money first. That’s how the creators of Darkleaks, a “black market where you can sell information”, imagine the next generation of whistleblowers will operate.

The impact of whistleblowers today has never been greater: from Edward Snowden’s revelations about mass surveillance to the HSBC employee who exposed the bank’s efforts to help clients evade hundreds of millions of dollars in tax payments.

But not all leaks are in the public interest. For example there has also been a sharp rise in malicious leaks, such as the 500 private photographs of celebrities which were distributed online last August.


Darkleaks could facilitate all kinds of disclosure, positive and negative, via an anonymous marketplace. The service is available to download online as a free software package and its source code has been published openly online via code-sharing website Github. Users can upload a file with a description that can be viewed by potential buyers browsing the marketplace. This is all done within the software itself.

Its developers say that individuals may wish to use the service to anonymously auction off “trade secrets”, “military intelligence” and “proof of tax evasion” among other, rather more unsavoury, things.

Darkleaks promises to make transactions for this sort of material anonymous. A blog post announcing the tool insists: “There is no identity, no central operator and no interaction between leaker and buyers.”

Instead, the documents are broken into smaller chunks, encrypted by Darkleaks and added to the bitcoin block chain, a register of bitcoin payments. This is possible because minuscule bitcoin transactions can be used by anyone to store data in the block chain. Indeed, there are already services like Storj which offer to store data in bitcoin-style block chains in this manner.

Crucially, small pieces of a file up for sale will be released to potential buyers so that they can verify its contents before committing to a transaction for the whole thing. When they have made that commitment, and the seller claims his or her bitcoins, a key will be released allowing the buyer to decrypt the document in question.

It’s just one of a series of “platforms” for leaking sensitive information which have appeared in recent years. From WikiLeaks to the Guardian newspaper’s SecureDrop software, there are now many technological portals to which leakers may turn in an effort to get a burning secret out. And projects such as GlobaLeaks hope to create a decentralised forum for the release of information.

However, until now none of these services has featured direct payment for a leak.

So is the financial aspect really necessary? Annie Machon, a former MI5 intelligence officer and whistleblower, says it is unfortunate that Darkleaks has equated whistleblowing with selling information. This is also the opinion of Beatrice Edwards, executive director of the Government Accountability Project in the US.

“When you’re selling information you’re not really a whistleblower under the legislative legal definition in almost any country,” she points out. Only in special circumstances, such as the US financial services, when whistleblowers may receive a cut of fines imposed on their corporations, has this been enshrined in law. However, Edwards adds that the current climate may encourage whistleblowers to take unusual steps in order to protect themselves and release information in the public interest.

Going underground

“We have seen in the US an increasingly punitive attitude on the part of the government towards whistleblowers,” Edwards says. “This could force them into some underground exchange of information like this because the Obama administration prosecutes national security whistleblowers rather than protecting them.”

“The US’s punitive attitude to whistleblowers could force them into using exchanges like this”

Machon agrees. “You do need these sorts of groups,” she says. “We are looking at a period of small, nimble information freedom fighters pushing back against these homogenised corporate and state powers to protect our basic human rights.”

James Young is an attorney at international law firm Morgan & Morgan who represents whistleblowers in the financial industry. He says that those wanting to expose wrongdoing have expressed a need for more secure channels through which to do so.

“There is a need for whistleblowers to confidentially and securely share information with news media, attorneys, the government or whoever might be the right person to get it,” he says. “With everything we know about cellphones and the internet, there’s no sure-fire way to do that right now.”

Some may question the darker side of Darkleaks. One of the suggested disclosures that users could make via the service, according to its creators, is the publication of “celebrity sex pictures”. Already, one individual claims to be auctioning thousands of passwords and private messages via the site, though this has not yet been verified.

For Edwards, this is where the definition of whistleblower breaks down. “In distinction from a whistleblower, a snitch or an informer pursues his or her own interest. Someone who is selling information and needs to anonymise the exchange is probably someone who fits in to that category,” she says.

Cody Wilson is an anarchist and co-founder of Dark Wallet, a digital bitcoin wallet which promises to make transactions practically impossible to trace. Wilson was not involved in the development of Darkleaks but says he has watched the service’s launch with interest. “It’s a necessary step for the advancement of decentralised and block chain-based technologies,” he says, arguing that corporations and state dominance should be challenged more aggressively by the public.

Wilson achieved notoriety in 2012 when he launched the Wiki Weapon Project, which allowed anyone to download 3D printable guns via the internet. Will people suffer as a result of unsavoury leaks made via Darkleaks? “Without a doubt,” he says. “There are going to be victims.”

Leader: “Online secrets market could revolutionise economies“

This article appeared in print under the headline “Dark secrets for sale”