James Dolan, co-creator of SecureDrop, who has tragically passed away

anarcho-pirate (54)in #wikileaks • 7 years ago

James Dolan one of the co-creators of SecureDrop and Freedom of the Press Foundation’s first full time employee took his own life over the holidays. He was 36.

In a message on Twitter wikileaks wrote this :

"Second developer of WikiLeaks inspired submission system "SecureDrop", security expert James Dolan, aged 36, has tragically died. He is said to have committed suicide. The first, Aaron Swartz, is said to have taken his own life at age 26, after being persecuted by US prosecutors."

James worked with Aaron Swartz and journalist Kevin Poulsen to build the original prototype of SecureDrop, the open source whistleblower submission system, which was then called DeadDrop.

Beyond a couple references on our website, that New Yorker story is virtually all that is in the public domain about James’s involvement in the project—and that’s how he preferred it. James was an intensely private and modest person, and despite the fact the SecureDrop soon got a lot of attention when Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) took the project over, he constantly insisted that Aaron deserved all the credit. Yet SecureDrop would not currently exist without James, and he deserves all the commendation in the world for making it what it is today say Trevor Timm Executive director, Freedom of the Press Foundation

"It is impossible to overstate how fundamentally important James Dolan was to the development of both Freedom of the Press Foundation and SecureDrop. We are heartbroken he is gone, but we are also eternally grateful to have known and worked with him."

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