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'This handbook is a very important practical tool for journalists and it is of particular importance to investigative reporters. For the first time journalists are now aware that virtually every electronic communication we make or receive is being recorded, stored and subject to analysis and action. As this surveillance is being conducted in secret, without scrutiny, transparency or any realistic form of accountability, our sources, our stories and our professional work itself is under threat.

Journalists were dismayed by the realisation that almost all digital communications are now being recorded; for them and their sources there are real risks and now danger in their work. This danger does not just worry reporters, whistleblowers and other sources, but all those who hear privileged information and whose privacy is considered fundamental to the courts, the practice of law, and justice in all of its meanings.  Lawyers and accountants and their clients are now without the protection of client confidentiality, and are vulnerable to the secret surveillance of an increasingly authoritarian and unaccountable state.

After knowing how Snowden’s disclosures were safely presented to the public, we know that there are real safeguards and counter measures available.  The CIJ’s latest handbook, Information Security for Journalists, lays out the most effective means of keeping your work private and safe from spying.  It explains how to write safely, how to think about security and how to safely receive, store and send information that a government or powerful corporation may be keen for you not to know, to have or to share.  To ensure your privacy and the safety of your sources, Information Security for Journalists will help you to make your communications indecipherable, untraceable and anonymous.

When planning work that must remain private and confidential it is important to carefully assess the level of threat that may be associated with it.   Shop floor maintenance, building site health and safety, restaurant hygiene, and hospital cleaning may be areas where the precautions and methods described here are unnecessary or might act to complicate and slow down your work. In these cases a phone call made or received away from work or home to a source or a reporter, may ensure sufficient protection at least in making an initial contact.

People working or reporting on national security, the military, intelligence, nuclear affairs, or at high levels of the state and in major corporations should probably consider this handbook as very important to their safety.

Although this handbook is largely about how to use your computer, you don’t need to have a computer science degree to use it. Its authors, and other experts advising on the project have worked to ensure its practical accuracy and usability.  The authors expect that after six months, updates and some changes will be required.'

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