Tag Archives: UniLeaks

Help Me Investigate in 2013 – and 2014

As Help Me Investigate starts to plan new investigations in 2014, it’s a good time to look back at what we’ve been up to over the last year across the four sites (not including this blog). It’s easy to forget how much you do in a year – thanks to the many contributors who made everything below happen. As always, we’ve learned a lot and hit the new year wiser.

HMI Health

Help Me Investigate Health kicked off the year by organising an event on reporting the new health system with the BBC College of JournalismIn April we took part in and reported on a masterclass on health reporting organised by the National Union of Journalists and in May we spoke at and liveblogged a Medical Journalists Association event on the reorganised NHS.

HSJ logo

HMI Health editor Tom Warren and HMI Education editor Matt Burgess worked with the Health Service Journal to compile a list of FOI emails for clinical commissioning groups – the new bodies controlling health spending.

And we scraped the data that helped Scotland’s Sunday Post report on councils abandoning elderly people because they couldn’t afford the care at home and a 7% increase in absenteeism in Scottish authorities.

We also reported on Barnet, Enfield and Hillingdon referring fewer than 4% of depressed patientsNHS Merseyside spending £65,000 on re-hiring staff who worked for its predecessor, and the worst times to go to A&E in the Midlands. Continue reading

The leak movement: This Machine Kills Secrets

This Machine Kills Secrets - book on Wikileaks, cryptography, security

Note: this is a lengthy post so you may want to get yourself comfortable!

There is more to leaking than Wikileaks, and a more interesting tale to be told than theirs. In This Machine Kills Secrets, Andy Greenberg looks at that story – and it’s an important read for any journalist interested in working with sources in the 21st century.

The book combines a history of the leaks movement – from cryptography geeks and early document sites like Cryptome – to an overview of the proliferation of new, Wikileaks-inspired sites from Al Jazeera’s leaks site to Unileaks – many of which lack basic security.

Along the way there are insights into every aspect of leaking: the technology, organisational and human factors, the politics and the culture. It’s a timely book as the world embarks on a debate about privacy, security, and transparency sparked by Edward Snowden’s own latest ‘megaleak’. Continue reading