Harlo Holmes
Chief Information Security Officer and Director of Digital Security, Freedom of the Press Foundation
Keeping journalists safe in the Wild West of the internet
Harlo Holmes is the chief information security officer and director of digital security at the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation. Although her background is in engineering, Holmes said she wanted to apply her deep knowledge of tech to journalism and modern storytelling.
Her work with reporters ranges from mapping out secure communication with sources to helping them travel safely for stories. She has even traveled with teams to prepare them for unfamiliar situations. Holmes also works with journalists after they’ve finished field work to make sure they’re secure before their story is published.
By Agnes Cheung
My career really started during the “Snowden days,” when Edward Snowden leaked classified information from the National Security Agency. I was enraged by the knowledge of global surveillance but not surprised at the same time.
Every country has surveillance capabilities. With my engineering background, I realized I could provide the types of protections that journalists need in order for modern newsrooms to carry out their work.
It finally clicked during my Open News fellowship at the New York Times that I’d be most useful assisting journalists. Because of my background in open source and hacktivism, NYT colleagues would ask me how to use the dark web and how to contact sources securely for their investigations. I saw the need for a position in the newsroom to help journalists go from A to Z in terms of security when working on public-interest journalism, especially with sensitive investigations.
I do not consider myself a journalist. I had bylines here or there, but my data-journalism days are over. Now I do digital security for high-impact, public-interest journalism internationally. I also work with a number of newsrooms, freelancers, documentary filmmakers and investigative units to secure their stories from start to finish. So much of today’s journalism actually comes from people who are assisting, who are helping journalists make their stories happen.
A friend of mine said that I’m like a bass player in a band. Nobody really cares about the bass player, but the bass player is really moving a lot of weight and keeping the music going. I’m very comfortable with being in the background like that.
Exposing Vast Surveillance Systems
I worked on filmmaker Assia Boundaoui’s documentary “The Feeling of Being Watched.” It’s about a Muslim community in Chicago that had been actively surveilled by the FBI in the ’90s for no reason other than that they were Muslim. As Assia was doing her field research, she really felt that sense of being watched and needed my advice on how to better prepare herself and safeguard the people she was interviewing.
It’s a beautiful film, and it was incredibly praised. Through working with her, I got to understand not only what source protection means, but also digital security for talent and what it means to be automatically on a public stage premiering a film.
Then in the “Project Raven” story, I worked with journalists from Reuters who received a lot of leaked documents from a source showing that the United Arab Emirates used former U.S. intelligence officers to build vast surveillance networks. I created a system for the team to go through all of the leaked documents. There were so many documents, and the data they received was so sensitive — they wanted to properly fact check under very extreme circumstances.
The reporting was so compelling that it moved Congress. A year later, the United States government instituted a law requiring employees who left a U.S. intelligence post to wait at least three years before working for a foreign government. I am still so proud of that team.
Keeping Empathy at the Heart of Digital Security
What I wish journalists would know is that it’s really not their job to keep digital security and cyber safety in their heads all the time. There’s a certain amount of paralyzation that happens if you get held up in the things that are not your job. I would recommend asking for help. Know that there are people out there whose job is to help you do yours. That help could be from within your organization but also from outside.
I love experiencing the world from other people’s eyes. I think professionally, empathy and a global perspective are really important. When I speak to someone, I want to properly contextualize and empathize with them on the level that they’re at, stepping into their shoes and offering my professional opinion based on what I know they are encountering on the ground. Anyone who does otherwise is derelict in their duties.
So much of today’s journalism actually comes from people who are assisting, who are helping journalists make their stories happen.
In digital security, there are some people who pretend to know what it’s like to try to use a phone securely to talk to a source in the middle of the woods in Uganda. But I’ve actually gone there, and I do know. That’s what makes me, our organization and the constellation of professional contacts within this field excel at this job rather than some bullshitter on Twitter.
When I go into consultations, I usually keep a light touch on the subject matter. I don’t really look at the material and I ask very minimal questions about the investigation. I can’t care about it because it’s too much data to carry around both in my head and also on my computer.
But then when I open a newspaper or watch a documentary, that feeling of knowing the inner workings of the story makes me feel so proud — as a citizen, not only of the United States, but also of the whole world.
I think that how I assist in journalism is where my feeling of citizenship meets my work. It is incredibly gratifying.