From today you can report something to Insider without saying who you are. Go to insider.sm/segnala, write what you know and, if you wish, attach documents and photos. We won’t ask for your name, and only I read the reports.
We did this because in San Marino, silence is rarely indifference. More often, it’s caution.
In a country where everyone knows everyone, those who have witnessed something wrong know exactly how much it costs to speak up. So many things stay exactly where they were born — in an office, in a drawer, in a hushed conversation.
Anyone who does this job knows it.
The stories that truly matter are never born in the newsroom. They’re born from someone who saw something and decided to speak. A newspaper’s job is to make that step possible, and then to do its work thoroughly.
What it is not
It is not a confessional, and it is not a court.
A report alone never becomes an article. We verify it first, with documents and other sources. Before publishing anything, we always hear from the person involved.
We don’t pay anyone for information, and we don’t publish private details that aren’t relevant to the story.
We’re not after gossip or scores to settle.
We’re after facts that citizens have a right to know. Public money, decisions that affect everyone, rules that apply to some but not others.
The promise, and its limits
Protecting sources for a journalist is both a legal obligation and a matter of conscience.
I will honour it.
But we also owe our readers honesty about the limits. For certain crimes, such as corruption, the law allows a judge to request the sources.
And no system can protect someone who shares a detail known only to a handful of people. That’s why the strongest protection remains a single one: not telling us your name.
And writing carefully, from your own phone rather than your office one.
We’d rather say this clearly today than promise something no one can truly guarantee.
The tool we use, and why
The reporting box runs on GlobaLeaks, free software for anonymous reporting, created in Italy in 2011.
It is used by more than 30,000 organisations worldwide. In Italy, it was also chosen by the National Anti-Corruption Authority for its national whistleblowing platform. Investigative journalists and organisations such as Transparency International and Amnesty International rely on it too.
We chose it for three reasons.
It’s open. The code is public. Anyone can check what it does, and no one can hide anything inside it.
It’s audited. Since 2011 it has been examined by independent security firms such as Cure53, Radically Open Security and Least Authority.
It’s built to protect whoever writes to us. It doesn’t log the connection’s IP address. Every report is encrypted with a key that only I hold: not even whoever manages the server can read it. It can also be used with Tor Browser, software that hides where a connection comes from.
The reporting box runs on its own dedicated server, in Europe, separate from the newspaper’s website. Anything that doesn’t become a story deletes itself automatically after 90 days.
An open door
A small country needs journalism that isn’t afraid, and citizens who don’t have to be either.
This reporting box is our way of keeping a door open. If you know something San Marino ought to know, you know where to find us.
Francesca Devincenzi – Editor of insider.sm
