[[!meta date="Thu Dec 15 12:34:56 2016"]]
[[!meta title="French journal Mediapart supports Tails, others should too"]]
[[!tag announce]]

We are very excited to announce that
[Mediapart](https://www.mediapart.fr), an independent French investigative
journal, has decided to support Tails financially every year.

[[!img mediapart.png link="no"]]

In the past years, Mediapart has played a central role in the revelation
and investigation of several major French political scandals. As such
they are well aware of the digital threats faced by their sources,
their journalists, and their readers.

Tails has gained recognition by being used by Edward Snowden and the
journalists reporting on his NSA leaks in 2014. [According to Barton
Gellman](https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/blog/2014/04/help-support-little-known-privacy-tool-has-been-critical-journalists-reporting-nsa):

« *Privacy and encryption work, but it's too easy to make a mistake that
exposes you. Tails puts the essential tools in one place, with a design
that makes it hard to screw them up. I could not have talked to Edward
Snowden without this kind of protection. I wish I'd had it years ago.* »

Since then [[many journalists around the
world|news/who_are_you_helping#journalists]] understood this approach
and adopted Tails to make it easier to stay safe. As Jean-Marc Manach
puts it:

« *War reporters have to buy helmets, bullet-proof vests and rent
armored cars; journalists using the Internet for their investigations
are much luckier: to be as secured as war reporters, they only have to
download Tails, burn it on a CD, install it on a SD card, and learn the
basics of information and communication security, and it's free!* »

In the same way that news organizations invest in physical security or
proprietary software tools to do their work, news organizations should
also invest in free software tools that, as [security experts like Bruce
Schneier](http://boingboing.net/2013/12/15/bruce-schneier-and-eben-moglen-2.html)
have repeatedly stated, are going to be safe:

« *I think most of the public domain privacy tools are going to be safe,
yes. [...] I think that Tails is going to be safe. [...] You know, the
NSA has a big lever when a tool is written closed-source by a for-profit
corporation. There are levers they have that they don't have in the open
source international, altruistic community. And these are generally
written by crypto-paranoids, they're pretty well designed.* »

As such, Tails has been the recommended secure platform
for use with the [SecureDrop](https://securedrop.org/) and
[GlobaLeaks](https://globaleaks.org/) whistle-blowing platforms.

Talking about the challenges of the adoption of encryption by
journalists, the Internet freedom expert [Christopher Soghoian said
at #EncryptNews](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JktB6h-qnKA), a
conference on digital security and journalism:

« *News organizations need to also contribute to this community pool of
tools. We need to have [reporters] contributing patches to PGP, OTR, and
Tails. These organizations need to be funding $5.000 or $10.000 improvements
to make these tools better. Because everyone is relying on these tools
and none of the major organizations that are actually benefiting them
are actually contributing to their development.* »

Mediapart is the first news organization to officially endorse Tails
and answer our call for donations. We hope they are not going to be the
last.

If your organization is also interested in becoming a regular donor,
please contact us at [[mailto:tails-accounting@boum.org]] ([[OpenPGP
key|tails-accounting.key]]).

<div id="donate-button">[[Donate|donate#mediapart]]</div>
