Hackathon

SecureDrop Hackathon

SecureDrop is a whistleblower submission system that media organizations use to securely accept documents from and communicate with anonymous sources. Originally written by Aaron Swartz, it's currently maintained by Freedom of the Press Foundation. Dozens of news organizations including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Intercept, and many others now use SecureDrop.

When's the next hackathon?

The next SecureDrop hackathon will take place at the 2022 Aaron Swartz Day and International Hackathon on November 12-13, 2022 with in-person participation at the Internet Archive in San Francisco, and remote participation world-wide.

Please join us in our Gitter chatroom during the event.

How SecureDrop Works

• Read the overview in the SecureDrop documentation for an overview of the architecture.

• Also consider checking out the Source Guide and Journalist Guide to see how users interact with SecureDrop.

• Watch our previous presentations about the next generation of SecureDrop, the SecureDrop Workstation:

  • Qubes Summit, September 2022: Building secure applications with Qubes OS
  • FPF, August 2020: A virtual event with The Guardian's Head of Investigations
  • USENIX Enigma, January 2020: Next-Generation SecureDrop

How you can contribute to SecureDrop

SecureDrop welcomes contributions of all kinds. Read our Getting Started Guide to learn how to contribute.

Repos for the event

Check out repos for the hackathon:

• SecureDrop server repository

  • Dev environment setup - x68 OS with Docker support required

• SecureDrop client repository - Python + Qt

  • Getting Started - x86 Linux or macOS required, Qubes is optional for development

• SecureDrop documentation

  • Documentation Guidelines - Python required

These tickets have been triaged to be good-sized projects for the hackathon, but if there are other tickets you find interesting, comment in chat, on GitHub or ask a contributor in person and we'll let you know if that's a good ticket to take on.

Also feel free to make new tickets if you find anything confusing!

Translate

• If you speak another language in addition to English, please help us translate SecureDrop or the SecureDrop Client into another language!

• See the Translator Guide to learn more. And head over to https://securedrop.org/translate to get started translating!

How you can get help

• Talk to the SecureDrop developers in our Gitter channel: https://gitter.im/freedomofpress/securedrop
• Comment on the issue or pull request! We use Github to plan work together.
• If you're at the event in person, come talk to us! Many of us will be wearing swag with the Freedom of the Press Foundation logo or the SecureDrop logo:

Links to past events

• Aaron Swartz Day: https://www.aaronswartzday.org/asd-2021/

Happy hacking!