To reach the particular law office which has become a specialist in this particular case, yes you are trapped because they use MS Outlook. There is no way to exchange email with them without involving MS.

Victims can use any lawyer, but any other lawyer will need to research the case (at the victim’s cost).

Self hosting would mean I could control account creation and make many burner accounts. But there are issues with that:

• If there are several burner accounts then the admin would have to make it easy for others to create burner accounts or else it would be evident that all the burner accounts are just the admin’s, which does not solve the aggregation problem. It introduces complexities because the DNS provider and ISP would have the identity of the self-hoster. One could onion host but that greatly narrows the audience.
• It does not solve the problem for others. Everyone who has the same need would then be needlessly forced to independently solve all these same problems.
• I do not have high-speed unlimited internet, so I would have to spend more on subscription costs.

I think it complicates the problem and then each author has to deal with the same. If it’s solved at the fedi API level, then the existing infrastructure is ready to work.

(edit) I recall hearing about a fedi client application that operates in a serverless way. I don’t recall the name of it and know little about how it works, but it is claimed to not depend on account creation on a server and it somehow has some immunity to federation politics. Maybe that thing could work but I would have to find it again. It’s never talked about and I wonder why that is… maybe it does not work as advertised.

Those do not obviate the use cases I have in mind. Secure drops are useful tools for specific whistle blowing scenarios. But they are not a one-size-fits-all tool.

I routinely use framadrop and then transmit the links to regulators or whoever I am targeting to act on a report. But what if the target audience is not a specific journalist or regulator but rather the entire general public? The general public does not have access to reports submitted to the Guardian’s dropbox or NYTimes’ dropbox. Those are exclusive channels of communication just for their own journalists. The report then only gets acted on or exposed if the story can compete with the sensationalisation level of other stories they are handling. If I’m exposing privacy abuses, the general public does not give a shit about privacy for the most part. So only highly scandelous privacy offenses can meet the profitable publication standards of Guardian and nytimes. The reports also cannot be so intense as to be on par with Wikileaks. There is a limited intensity range.

The fedi offers some unique reach to special interest groups like this one without the intensity range limitation.

NYtimes is also a paywall. So even if the story gets published it still ends up a place of reduced access.

They are great tools for some specific jobs but cannot wholly replace direct anonymous publication. Though I must admit I often overlook going to journalists. I should use those drop boxes more often.

(edit) from the guardian page:

Once you launch the Tor browser, copy and paste the URL xp44cagis447k3lpb4wwhcqukix6cgqokbuys24vmxmbzmaq2gjvc2yd.onion or theguardian.securedrop.tor.onion into the Tor address bar.

That theguardian.securedrop.tor.onion URL caught my attention. I did not know about onion names until now. Shame it’s only for secure drops.

Customers should take several proactive steps to protect their personal information and reduce potential risks: Be Wary of Phishing Attempts

Customers should rethink their stupid ass decision to use AT&T in the first place since it has been known for over a decade that AT&T is the most privacy abusive of all US telecoms, most notably their role in project Fairview (archive for clearnet users and wikipedia).

AT&T customers don’t give a shit about privacy. But I do have some sympathy for all the non-AT&T people who communicated with AT&T pawns.

BTW, the OP’s link avoids reclaimthenet’s shitty popup if proxied through 12ft.io:

https://12ft.io/https://reclaimthenet.org/nearly-all-at

Not sure it matters since the text is in the OP anyway… guess if someone wants to share it around.