International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Investigative journalists collect large numbers of digital documents during their investigations. These documents can greatly benefit other journalists' work. However, many of these documents contain sensitive information. Hence, possessing such documents can endanger reporters, their stories, and their sources. Consequently, many documents are used only for single, local, investigations. We presented DatashareNetwork, a decentralized and privacy-preserving search system that enables journalists worldwide to find documents via a dedicated network of peers, as the first search engine designed by journalists for journalists in 2020 to address this problem. We start the talk by introducing real-world problems that investigative journalists face and describe DatashareNetwork as a possible solution. Then, we discuss the practical challenges of moving forward from an academic prototype to deploying DatashareNetwork for the International Consortium of Investigative (ICIJ). This talk covers (1) our joint requirement gathering and (2) design with journalists, (3) a user study to help ICIJ with presenting the privacy property of our system to journalists and making utility/privacy trade-off decisions, (4) deployment challenges to integrate DatashareNetwork into ICIJ's IT infrastructure, and finally (5) open problems that require more attention from the community.