Source Safeguarding: Protecting Whistleblowers and Leaks

Whistleblowers remain essential to investigative journalism, but face unprecedented threats from sophisticated surveillance tools and normalized criminal prosecutions. As governments globally expand retaliatory tactics and newsrooms shrink, even well-resourced outlets have made catastrophic source protection missteps. This session examines how spyware and authoritarian surveillance put journalists and their sources in danger while providing practical information on digital security protocols, legal safeguards, and ethical frameworks to defend the sources who enable vital public interest reporting.