SecureDrop

Welcome to Black Rose, Lucy Parsons Labs’ SecureDrop instance. SecureDrop is an open-source whistleblower platform built for anonymity through Tor and using strong encryption to protect personal information and data. Black Rose is Chicago’s first instance of SecureDrop. In a city of widespread political corruption and deep ties to the business community, there is a strong need for a high-security platform for leaks. Chicago’s long and unbroken history of police brutality leaves it in deep need of public scrutiny. Leak us those secrets and we will publish them to the world.

As a radical transparency organization, we believe it is crucial to expand the methods by which the public can gain access to information. Many of the tools that journalists, citizens, and the general public are expected to rely on are fundamentally broken. While laws such as the Freedom of Information Act are intended to provide access to information, FOIA responses are routinely delayed, redacted to the point of illegibility, or forced into litigation. These barriers are intentional and designed to maintain control over information. We seek to dismantle barriers to the free flow of information. Furthermore, as a society we should be building avenues for information to be released in any capacity including leaking.

If you are attempting to contact us to use our SecureDrop instance, please read our privacy policy first. NEVER contact us over insecure channels (unencrypted emails, Twitter, etc) and maintain proper security hygiene. This requires at minimum contacting us from WiFi hotspots that are not associated with your normal physical locations.

• We recommend using a computer that you are confident has not been compromised.
• You will need to download and install the Tor Browser Bundle from Tor Project.
• For additional levels of security, we strongly recommend downloading Tails. Tails is a live operating system that you can boot into that will route all of your traffic through the Tor network. The Tor Browser is also bundled into Tails.
• Open the Tor Browser and copy and paste this link into a new Tor Browser window: http://qn4qfeeslglmwxgb.onion/
• Follow the instructions for uploading documents. If you have multiple submissions or a large submission, you may need to break it up into several uploads.
• Please do not lose the code name which will be assigned to you when you submit documents. We will use that code name to message you back if we need to. Previous messages will be automatically destroyed after we contact you.
• Source requests as to how the material should be handled are important to us and we will respect them. Please in your submission include any additional requests, e.g. if you would like the data to be immediately published vs. worked on by a specific journalist, if you would like the data to be withheld until after a specific date, etc.

After uploading to us, we will review your submission and pass it on to a journalist with access to our SecureDrop instance. Please keep a close eye on our Warrant Canary which we update manually every month.

The Lucy Parsons Labs would like to thank the Freedom of the Press Foundation (in particular Kevin Gallagher), the Tor Project, Tails, our legal counsel, the technical community, and Club Mate.