Jigsaw, the human rights-focused division of Alphabet, has recently announced Outline, a project that aims to protect the online communications of journalists. This service is offered for free to interested news organizations and individuals, and Outline’s software is compatible with a variety of operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and Android OS. This service primarily aims to help keep the communications of journalists private by setting up a virtual private network (VPN) and encrypting data while it is traveling on a country’s national network, where messages and other forms of communication are exposed to surveillance authorities.
To further appeal to news organizations, Jigsaw noted that the Outline software has been designed so that it can be easily managed even by people who are not tech savvy. There are two software tools that the group offers as part of the service. First is the Outline Manager, which is used to create a server and control which people can access the VPN. Journalists may choose to use their own server hardware or rent a virtual machine that is running on the infrastructure of a third-party cloud provider. The latter option may cost organizations at least $5 a month for a monthly data allocation of 500GB, although this option also allows news organizations to choose the location of the server. After setting up the server of the VPN, the Outline app can then be installed on user’s devices. It is important to note that the app only works with devices running Windows 7, Android 5.0 Lollipop, Chrome OS 64 or newer. In addition, Jigsaw has yet to release the Outline apps for iOS and macOS devices.
To further boost the security of the servers, Jigsaw has made Outline software open-source, allowing interested individuals to check and fix the vulnerabilities found in the software. Moreover, the software automatically updates whenever a new version has been released by Jigsaw, and the server does not keep any logs, preventing the leakage of user data in the occasion that the server gets hacked. The Outline service is just one of the recent efforts of Alphabet, and its subsidiary Google, to support journalists. The search giant, through the Google News Lab, has financed a number of journalist training initiatives and fact-checking operations. Google has also collaborated with the Report for America project, which aims to create 1,000 reporting positions across the United States, and it is also involved in helping veteran journalists gain digital skills.
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