Whisper Networking

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The frenzied first days of Donald Trump’s return to the presidency have been accompanied by a flurry of leaks from bureaucrats in Washington. That has not made Trump—or his henchman Elon Musk—happy. “With regard to leakers,” Musk posted on X, “if in doubt, they are out.” A crackdown on one leaker could silence others. Enter Psst.org—a homophonically named nonprofit providing a secure depository for government employees and technology workers to share concerns about wrongdoing or mayhem. Psst began accepting submissions on Inauguration Day. “We’re probably going to be quite busy in the next four years,” Amber Scorah, one of the founders, said.

Psst was dreamed up by a group of three women—two in the United States, one in the United Kingdom—aiming to build a whistleblower-to-journalist pipeline. Each came at the problem a different way. Scorah had grown up as a third-generation Jehovah’s Witness in Vancouver, where she rarely made contact with outsiders; later, she left the community and spoke out against its restrictions. She went on to become the president of a whistleblower support organization, Lioness, which developed into a media outlet for first-person essays in the public interest. Her partner Rebecca Petras, a former journalist, most recently headed operations at the Signals Network, another nonprofit dedicated to sharing public interest information with the press. The third founder, Jennifer Gibson, is a lawyer who ran the Signals Network’s whistleblower protection program. “I was increasingly seeing scenarios in which information was siloed,” Gibson said. Journalists would be working separately; sources would feel alone. “If these sources get burned because their employer finds out they did it or there is retaliation, people will stop coming. The chilling effect will be enormous.”

The problem felt acute as the war in Gaza raged, Gibson observed. Whistleblowers at Meta had information on how the company was moderating posts. “There were three of these people, each with a piece of the puzzle, each working with a different journalist—or in one case a civil society group,” she said. “What happened is, the story never came out.” As Petras noted, “The traditional whistleblower support model could not solve the supply issue. If you are really going to hold power to account, you need more people coming forward. We’re simply not going to get enough information out to hold companies accountable on the backs of a handful of whistleblowers.” The same would be true, they reasoned, of the White House. Promising a nonpartisan operation, they raised seed money from the Silicon Valley Community Fund, a prominent regional charity, and from individual donors. (The team declined to say who.) 

Psst is designed to give whistleblowers a sense of strength in numbers: when someone drops information into the safe, that person can choose to be notified if someone else has made a similar or related deposit. “That gives people a way to contribute, but without having to take it all on their shoulders,” Scorah said. After being notified of a match, a whistleblower can then speak to a lawyer through Psst and receive privileged advice. “They need that collectiveness, but that requires a centralization of information,” Gibson said.

Details are collected, and the story is shared with reporters strategically. “We’re bringing it to a journalist when it’s a little bit farther along than just another tip in the wild,” Scorah explained. The team will tap into their network and reach out to journalists they trust. “It really depends on the story,” she said. “We would be taking it to a journalist who has a specialty in the topic area.” If Psst becomes aware of a reporter with an investigation already in the works, and the right tip comes in, they may also try to make a connection.

Before sources make a deposit in the safe, Psst takes them through a list of prompts, to ensure that the tip is transferred securely: “Are you on a work-provided computer, phone, device, or network?” The site provides instructions on how to delete your browser cache, move to a personal device, and clean that device before proceeding. Tipsters are then offered options: they can keep their submission encrypted unless there is an information match, or deposit information and leave it locked in the vault. (They reserve the right to change their mind.) Only after making selections are whistleblowers shown a page where to share their story. The idea is to be as transparent as possible with sources, so they don’t “make all the mistakes that many whistleblowers make because they didn’t realize they were whistleblowers until it was much too late,” Scorah said. 

In its first few weeks, Psst has received a steady stream of submissions. In government, as well as the tech world, “we have a period in time in which the guardrails are very shaky, if not coming off,” Gibson said. “Historically, when the guardrails are in danger of coming off, it’s been an insider that’s put them back. So we really do need to figure out a way to make it safer over the next few years for those insiders to help us put the guardrails back on.”

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Meghnad Bose is a Delacorte fellow at CJR.