Attacks on journalists and freedom of the press have increased markedly over the past several years around the globe, yet most journalists are not adopting online security practices that could help defend against such attacks. This new report from Citizen Lab fellow Kirstin Berdan posits that a key reason why journalists do not take sufficient action to protect themselves online is that there is an overwhelming amount of security advice on the internet, most of which is difficult for journalist-readers to understand or translate into practice, and difficult for the authors of the advice to keep up to date.
The analysis in this paper seeks to answer three questions: (1) what security advice exists for journalists specifically? (2) is the existing advice effective? and (3) what is the best way to measure that? To answer these questions, the authors report findings from an analysis of 33 online security guides available on the public internet that are geared toward journalists. The analysis revealed that most online security guides for journalists do not prioritize their content effectively, and provide no clear path for users to improve their security in a time-efficient way. The advice provided was also inconsistent across the guides. This paper concludes with recommendations to make guides and security education of journalists overall more effective.
