A 22-year-old Maltese youth has pioneered a secure platform to help journalists and human rights activists keep their work safe from the authorities.

Max Thake was at a company bootcamp in Florida when he heard journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia had been killed in a brutal car bombing.

“That day in Florida everyone dropped what they were doing to discuss how we could somehow fuse the technology we were working on with what Daphne fought for, to the benefit of investigative journalism and freedom of speech.

“Talks went on into the night, but by the next morning we had a fairly clear idea of what we were going to do. A ‘Dropbox on the blockchain’.

Max Thake

“A secure, anonymous, decentralised storage platform that would make it possible for journalists to safely store their data without ever needing to directly trust friends, relatives, colleagues, institutions or centralised servers,” he told The Sunday Times of Malta.

The initial blockchain idea later evolved into a cloud-based system using the anonymous Tor network, also known as the Onion Router.

This platform, known as Onion Routed Cloud, or ORC, will allow journalists and other organisations to establish a trusted grid of storage points within the wider network.

Mr Thake said that once a trusted grid is established, the participants may upload and download files using a simple web application with a familiar interface.

“The users that compose a trusted grid each share the responsibility of storing incomplete pieces of each other’s encrypted files with zero knowledge of how many other parts there are, which peers are storing them, or how to read their contents,” Mr Thake said.

The team behind the project has already spoken to journalists and media organisations all over the world.

Mr Thake says the next step is to perform a third-party audit of the system to guarantee its integrity.

“Once tested we can work with journalists to implement the tech and give these heroes another layer of security, another tool to help them do their work”.

A crowdfunding page has been set up to help raise $30,000 (€26,000) to pay for the audit.

You can find the crowdfunding page on: https://www.gofundme.com/onion-routed-cloud

“The technology is there, the team is ready. Now it’s up to the public to decide whether it and what it stands for are worth funding, worth fighting for”, Mr Thake said.