Transcript
Harlow Holmes (0:00)
Foreign.
Host of 404 Media Podcast (0:06)
Hello and welcome to another interview episode of the 404 Media podcast. 44 Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404 Media Co as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get early access to episodes like this one. Gain access to that content@404 media co. This this week I'm joined by Harlow Holmes. Harlow is the Chief Security Programs Officer at Freedom of the Press Foundation. She's also a media scholar, software programmer and activist.
Harlow Holmes (0:37)
Hi Harlow.
Host of 404 Media Podcast (0:37)
I'm so excited to be here.
Harlow Holmes (0:39)
Thank you for having me.
Host of 404 Media Podcast (0:40)
Oh my gosh. So, so good to see you. You too. Yeah. So I was just saying off, off mic that all, all the things we're going to talk about today are like so timely and so they feel very urgent and pressing and your job has never been more crucial. So I' kind of start out with an introduction to the Freedom of the Press Foundation. What the work of the foundation is. Folks who are familiar with 404 are probably also familiar with freedom of the press. But just to give us an idea of what it is and then also what you do within the foundation.
Harlow Holmes (1:18)
Sure. I mean, I hope for our listeners are as familiar with us as we are with y', all, but. So Freedom of the Press foundation is a almost 14 year old 501C3 based here in the United States and we support press freedom in all of the ways that we can. And right now we do it in three ways. You probably have been most familiar with like, our advocacy team, which is comprised of legal scholars, lawyers and audience people, and journalists who track down every instance, large or small, where members of the press have had their right to report trampled upon and we advocate for them. We file amicus briefs, we issue statements of support, we hop in on legal cases. We have a newsroom called the US Press Freedom Tracker where that is documented. And our reporters there will literally like, you know, go with a case from start to finish with, you know, of course, the consent of anybody involved in order to keep not only like a journalistic record, but also a data record of instances that we've been seeing. And we've been doing this work for a, I mean, like, you know, relatively like a long time. And so it's a really, really excellent place to watch the trends in terms of tactics that are waged against members of the press in terms of like, you know, the chilling effects that it has and in terms of like, where that has been happening across the United States. So that's one thing that we do. And then maybe you've heard of various like, engineering efforts of ours, like SecureDrop, which is the most famous, which is a technical appliance that a number of newsrooms like install in their offices and that enables technical anonymity between sources and journalists at those newsrooms. But we also have like a number of other things like Danger Zone, which is a really cool tool in order to help you like scrub particular nasties like malware and trackers and stuff like that out of documents that you might come across during a typical day at a newsroom. So you can look at them in safety and share them safely and stuff like that. And then my team is the security training team where we have like a whole bunch of, you know, writing. So if you want a primer, if you want blog posts, if you want a. It's Valentine's Day coming up, we have these like signal stickers or whatever. Like these are efforts that we perform and we do a number of trainings, consultations, organizational security audits and stuff like that. Centered wherever journalism needs us most. And right now it's right at home.
