Want to leak to the Center for Public Integrity? Here’s how.

Introduction

Journalism has changed a lot since the Center for Public Integrity first opened its doors in 1989, but our mission has not: We aim to preserve democracy by revealing abuses of power, corruption and betrayal of the public trust.

We are one of the nation’s oldest nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative journalism organizations, but we can’t be everywhere. We need concerned citizens to lead us to stories of waste, fraud, abuse, corruption and malfeasance of all kinds.

If you have a story for us, you can always reach our reporters and editors through email or contact our tips line at tips@publicintegrity.org — or simply dial us at 202-466-1300.

But for more sensitive information, or when you want to blow a whistle on government misdeeds, you may want to remain anonymous while providing us with leads, data and documents we can use to both tell your story and verify and illuminate it through our own independent reporting. For such cases, we urge you to be extra-cautious and use one of these methods to reach us.

SecureDrop

SecureDrop is an open-source data submission system developed by the Freedom of the Press Foundation to protect whistleblowers and to encourage more whistleblowing. You can find information here about how to reach the Center for Public Integrity this way to securely and anonymously leak documents. Even we won’t know who you are, unless you want to tell us.

Download this source guide for more information on using SecureDrop.

You may also reach us the old fashioned way by simply sending material to our mailing address, but without including your return address:

The Center for Public Integrity
910 17th Street, NW, Suite 700
Washington, DC 20006
USA

For an added layer of security, we recommend using a neighborhood mailbox instead of a post office when mailing your envelope.

Why us?

The Center for Public Integrity is the nation’s largest nonprofit investigative journalism organization that’s headquartered in Washington, D.C.

We have 27 years of experience covering the corridors of power in the nation’s capital, and we’ve won a host of awards, including the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.

We have plenty of experience working with sensitive documents from trusted sources. Here are few examples:

• Internal Federal Election Commission emails showed how a top agency official misled employees into releasing confidential staff criticisms to her.
• Leaked documents used in our Politics of Pain project helped us uncover the activities of the Pain Care Forum, a group of opioid drugmakers and allied nonprofits that is coordinated by the chief lobbyist for Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin. Members of the group spent more than $880 million nationwide on lobbying and campaign contributions from 2006 through 2015 as they helped lead the charge to protect opioids from government oversight amid the ongoing addiction epidemic.
• We used leaked documents in the story, Secretive group destroys candidates’ chances, leaves few fingerprints, about a group called the Law Enforcement Alliance of America that inserted itself into elections, flooded the airwaves with attack ads and often tipped the scales in favor of the state candidates they preferred.
• Leaked documents also helped us reveal the lobbying push by Big Tobacco that resulted in legislation favorable to its tobacco and e-cigarette products.
• Leaked documents helped us reveal flaws in the security arrangements for nuclear bomb ingredients in South Africa and India. They also helped us reveal details of illicit international trade in such materials.
• And leaked documents also gave us access to blunt internal U.S. assessments of how many nuclear weapons-related materials remain unsafeguarded.

We want to hold the powerful to account through additional investigative reporting. And we hope these new secure systems will make it easier to reach us.

So let’s hear from you. Many thanks.