It was with an extremely heavy heart that we recently learned our friend and former colleague James Dolan—one of the co-creators of SecureDrop and Freedom of the Press Foundation’s first full time employee—took his own life over the holidays. He was 36.
In 2012, James worked with Aaron Swartz and journalist Kevin Poulsen to build the original prototype of SecureDrop, the open source whistleblower submission system, which was then called DeadDrop.
In January 2013, Aaron Swartz himself committed suicide as the US government was attempting to prosecute him for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act related to allegedly copying academic articles from JSTOR.
This is getting creepy. Two people who worked on a whistleblower system happen to kill themselves?
Apparently Freedom of the Press Foundation just stopped taking money for Wikileaks recently. If that's the same Pierre Odamyar (sp?) funded group I'm thinking of.
Schmidt announced his resignation, we know he was all in for Hillary. But he's also been there a long, long while so not necessarily buying the conspiracy angle.
Being a whistleblower is no doubt very stressful. I'm not sure I would be brave enough to do it. It feels like it could be even worse than going into battle -- imagine having people trying to harm you because you are trying to do the right thing, but you never know when they will be coming to get you. Can you imagine being Julian Assange? The stress must be off the chart.
Also makes me appreciate that Patrick has been a whistleblower. I'm sure it has not always been easy.
I think sometimes the government leans on these people hard enough (see Aaron), so that even though they don't pull the trigger, they are certainly culpable. I think being skeptical is definitely the right stance until there is a full investigation.
This is getting creepy. Two people who worked on a whistleblower system happen to kill themselves?