Please note: We cannot provide you with legal advice about any obligations you might or might not have regarding disclosure of information. If you have concerns, consult an attorney.
There are few good ways to email documents to us anonymously.
While the instructions below are considered the latest “best practices” in sending emails anonymously, there is never 100% certainty, but these options below are your best chance.
Our email address is: climateleaks@tutanota.com — before you send us an email though, please take a read of this entire section carefully.
1. Do not email from your work or personal email address.
2. Do not use your personal or work internet wifi or network – go out to a public library or coffee shop that you do not frequent that has a free public wi fi network.
3. Download and use the Tor browser, which is a browser you can install on any operating system that allows you to cover up your tracks on the internet.
4. Create an email account on a service that does not require you to link another email address or mobile phone number. Many like Google Mail and Yahoo etc., require a back up email address and phone number. While there are various anonymous email services out there, we are using Tutanota Secure Email at the moment.
5. While Tutanota allows you to create an anonymous email address, it does not encrypt your messages, so they can be intercepted at the point between when you send an email and we receive it. To encrypt your messages, you can consider using PGP encryption on your new anonymous email account.
The best step-by-step tutorial we have seen for how to set up PGP email encryption is here on LifeHacker: How to Encrypt Your Email and Keep Your Conversations Private.
If you want to email Climate Doc Leaks using PGP encryption our PGP public fingerprint is:
6D21 1B75 1807 9DFF E4F3 07B4 8F19 801B 8CDD F36E
Or you can click here and download the PGP public file for Climate Doc Leaks.
6. Finally, before you send anything, be sure to check the “metadata” on the files you are sending. “Metadata” literally means “data about data.” Programs like Microsoft Word and Adobe PDF files add information automatically like “author name” and “created by.” Ensure you check the “properties” option on your document to that such information has been scrubbed.
One good way to scrub your metadata is to print a copy of the documents and then scan them as images or new PDF’s (just check properties again!).
Please read here for further information on how to leak documents. While the instructions we provide on the site will greatly minimize your chances of being found as the source of leaked documents, we cannot guarantee this with 100% certainty.
You can click here to contact us if you do not want to be anonymous and our team can work with you and offer advice on how to have the most impact.