Amber Scorah knows only too well that powerful stories can change society—and that powerful organizations will try to undermine those who tell them. In 2015, her 3-month-old son Karl died on his first day of day care. Heartbroken and furious that she hadn’t been with him, Scorah wrote an op-ed about the poor provision for parental leave in the US; her story helped New York City employees win their fight for improved family leave. In 2019 she wrote a memoir about leaving her tight-knit religion, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, that exposed issues within the secretive organization. The book cost her friends and family members, but she heard from many people who had also been questioning some of the religion’s controversial practices.
Then, while working at a media outlet that connects whistleblowers with journalists, she noticed parallels in the coercive tactics used by groups trying to suppress information. “There is a sort of playbook that powerful entities seem to use over and over again,” she says. “You expose something about the powerful, they try to discredit you, people in your community may ostracize you.”
In September 2024, Scorah cofounded Psst, a nonprofit that helps people in the tech industry or the government share information of public interest with extra protections—with lots of options for specifying how the information gets used and how anonymous a person stays.
Psst’s main offering is a “digital safe”—which users access through an anonymous end-to-end encrypted text box hosted on Psst.org, where they can enter a description of their concerns. (It accepts text entries only and not document uploads, to make it harder for organizations to find the source of leaks.)
What makes Psst unique is something it calls its “information escrow” system—users have the option to keep their submission private until someone else shares similar concerns about the same company or organization.
As the organization was preparing to launch, members of Psst’s team helped a group of Microsoft employees who were unhappy with how the company was marketing its AI products to fossil-fuel companies. Only one employee was willing to speak publicly, but others provided supporting documents anonymously. With help from Psst’s team of lawyers, the workers filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission against the company and aired their concerns in a story published by The Atlantic.
Combining reports from multiple sources defends against some of the isolating effects of whistleblowing and makes it harder for companies to write off a story as the grievance of a disgruntled employee, says Psst cofounder Jennifer Gibson. It also helps protect the identity of anonymous whistleblowers by making it harder to pinpoint the source of a leak. And it may allow more information to reach daylight, as it encourages people to share what they know even if they don’t have the full story.
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