

It’s a safe bet that Greenwald and Miranda will be fans. Onionshare could put more power in whistleblowers' hands, helping them send secrets to journalists who don’t have that sort of anonymous submission system in place.īut Lee also sees Onionshare being used for more common file-sharing situations where everyone involved knows each other but require utmost secrecy.
Onionshare app software#
That flips the model of how Tor enables leaks: Sites like WikiLeaks and news organizations using the anonymous leak software SecureDrop host their own Tor Hidden Services.
Onionshare app password#
If whistleblowers can securely send an Onionshare URL and password to a journalist, they potentially could use it to leak secrets anonymously without being exposed. Onionshare can be particularly useful when someone sending a file wants to remain anonymous even to the recipient, Lee says. “This lets you bypass all third parties, so that the file goes from one person to another over the Tor network completely anonymously.

The file could end up in the hands of law enforcement,” Lee says. “If you use a filesharing service like Dropbox or Mega or whatever, you basically have to trust them. After reading about Greenwald’s file transfer problem in Greenwald's new book, Lee created the program as a way of sharing big data dumps via a direct channel encrypted and protected by the anonymity software Tor, making it far more difficult for eavesdroppers to determine who is sending what to whom. On Tuesday he released Onionshare-simple, free software designed to let anyone send files securely and anonymously. That's exactly the sort of ordeal Micah Lee, the staff technologist and resident crypto expert at Greenwald’s investigative news site The Intercept, hopes to render obsolete. As a result, Greenwald’s partner David Miranda was detained at Heathrow, searched, and questioned for nine hours. They decided the safest way to transfer the sizable cache was to use a USB drive carried by hand to Greenwald's home in Brazil.

When Glenn Greenwald discovered last year that some of the NSA documents he'd received from Edward Snowden had been corrupted, he needed to retrieve copies from fellow journalist Laura Poitras in Berlin.
