A good story can start anywhere, including with anonymous tips, but
if you want to provide a meaningful tip for journalists, you should
share specific information — and not general speculation. At
Bloomberg, we cover governments and power around the globe, as well
as business and economics. If you have specific information you’d
like to share with Bloomberg News but don’t want to reveal your
identity to us, you can follow the methods below.
Please do not use these methods to send press releases or story
pitches.
Postal Mail
If you have documents or digital files on a thumb drive, you can send
them from a public mailbox without including a return address. Address
it to “TIPS” or to a specific reporter on the outside of the envelope.
New York
Bloomberg News
731 Lexington Ave
New York, NY 10022
DC
Bloomberg News
Floor 9
1101 New York Ave NW
Washington, DC 20005
London
Bloomberg News
3 Queen Victoria St
London EC4N 4TQ
UK
Hong Kong
Bloomberg News
Cheung Kong Centre
2 Queen’s Rd. Central
Central, Hong Kong
SecureDrop
Bloomberg maintains a SecureDrop server — a secure communication
platform designed to shield your identity. We set up our server in
conjunction with the project’s maintainers, the Freedom of the Press
Foundation to ensure it meets the highest industry standards. We
control the SecureDrop server, which stores any information you send
us in an encrypted format and if we are compelled to turn over
information provided to us via SecureDrop, we won’t have anything that
would reveal your identity, unless you chose to give us that
information.
How to
-
Download and install the Tor browser from TorProject.org. Ideally,
connect from public Wi-Fi or somewhere that isn’t your home or
office. Make sure that your computer does not have any malware or
spyware that could compromise your anonymity.
-
Our address on Tor is:
bloomberg.securedrop.tor.onion
or
ogdwaroarq4p6rnfn2hl4crvldyruyc2g24435qtxmd3twhevg7dsqid.onion
-
Once the Tor browser has connected, copy and paste that into the
address bar and follow the instructions.
-
Once you are given a codename, you can begin a correspondence with
our reporters or submit information. With this codename, you can
come back and log in again to check if our reporters have sent you a
message or to submit more information.
For added security, you may wish to connect to Tor on a computer
running the TAILS operating system.
Privacy information
-
We don’t ask or require you to provide any personally identifying
information when you submit materials through SecureDrop. However,
please keep in mind that the actual messages you send and receive
through SecureDrop may include personally identifying information
included by you or the journalist.
-
The system does not record your IP address, information about your
browser, computer, or operating system.
-
The server will only store the date and time of the newest message
sent from each source. Once you send a new message, the time and
date of your previous message is automatically deleted.
-
Journalists decrypt and read each message offline. Journalists will
delete messages and any materials submitted through SecureDrop from
the server on a regular basis. The date and time of any message will
be securely deleted from the server when the message is deleted.
-
Once you read a journalist’s message, we recommend you delete it. It
will then be securely deleted from the file system.
-
Also please note that when you submit certain types of files through
SecureDrop, you may be sending us metadata associated with that
file.
-
For example, if you submit a photo through SecureDrop in JPEG
format, the file may include information about the date, time, and
the GPS location of where it was taken, and the type of device used
to take the photo. Similarly, if you submit a Word file (.doc or
.docx) through SecureDrop, it may include the identity of the
document’s author, the author’s operating system, GPS data about the
author’s location, and the date and time when the document was
created.
Our policy is to scrub metadata from the files we receive through
SecureDrop before publication. If you don’t want to send us metadata,
please use the Metadata Anonymization Toolkit to scrub the file before
you submit it.
However, no one can truly guarantee 100% security of any system. Like
all software, SecureDrop may contain bugs. Ultimately, you use the
SecureDrop service at your own risk.
