Snitches Get Stitches: On The Difficulty of Whistleblowing

TL;DR

This paper examines the risks faced by whistleblowers and proposes a game-theoretic model to understand the power dynamics involved, highlighting technological and institutional factors affecting safe disclosure.

Contribution

It introduces a game-theoretic framework for analyzing whistleblowing risks and discusses technological and institutional strategies to improve whistleblower safety.

Findings

Whistleblowers are often vulnerable to others' motivations and abilities.

Technological solutions can mitigate risks but are limited by institutional constraints.

Institutional factors play a crucial role in whistleblower safety.

Abstract

One of the most critical security protocol problems for humans is when you are betraying a trust, perhaps for some higher purpose, and the world can turn against you if you're caught. In this short paper, we report on efforts to enable whistleblowers to leak sensitive documents to journalists more safely. Following a survey of cases where whistleblowers were discovered due to operational or technological issues, we propose a game-theoretic model capturing the power dynamics involved in whistleblowing. We find that the whistleblower is often at the mercy of motivations and abilities of others. We identify specific areas where technology may be used to mitigate the whistleblower's risk. However we warn against technical solutionism: the main constraints are often institutional.