Behind the WSJ’s Safehouse

Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic takes a closer look at Safehouse, the site launched Thursday by The Wall Street Journal for its sources to send it documents and information.

Madrigal writes, “‘It grew out of a conversation that a number of our editors had,’ said Kevin Delaney, managing editor of WSJ.com. ‘Our sources had always given us documents. That could have been a printout in a park or something that they faxed us. Now, clearly there is a digital context for reporting and that means we need a modern infrastructure so that sources can send documents to us.’

“Built in just a few months with internal resources, SafeHouse launched today. The Journal‘s online team has worked closely with its page-one staffers, which Delaney said was ‘a signal of how potentially journalistically significant,’ they think the project is.

“A key part of WikiLeaks’ early popularity was that it seemed secure and anonymous. The Journal wants to create a similar level (and perception) of technical excellence.

“‘You can’t offer absolute security or anonymity because it’s a technical product, but we’ve designed it to minimize the risk of security issues,’ Delaney said.

“SafeHouse runs on its own servers, separate from the servers that run the WSJ.com. File transfers occur through an encrypted connection and the documents themselves are encrypted, too. (Only a few Journal staffers will have the keys to unlock them.) Finally, the time that uploaded documents spend stored on computers with connections to the public Internet will be minimized by ‘a fairly complicated’ internal document flow system, Delaney said.”

Read more here.