[wyck]

Protect your sources by all means necessary if you want to built trust, the technology is in place to do this, the legal footing on the other hand can be tricky. You should host your servers in a country that has a solid legal framework in place to protect your data, Iceland for example. Honestly consult a lawyer who specializes in this, it is a legal issue and not a tech one.

The real problem is vetting your material, you will need to analyse and verify submissions before posting using real people, there is really no alternative when lives are at stake. This is the reason wikileaks collaborates with researchers and journalists, and there is an entire approval process. I must stress this point, you MUST have due diligence on your sources or else don't even bother.

Also keep in mind that several countries make anonymous services very difficult to use and even so they still might be monitored, you need to enable multiple avenues of submission and do a really good job at informing your user base on which is best.

You should have a very solid and dynamic server setup that can withstand attacks/DDos and domain name/ISP related takedowns.

tl;dr Learn from all the issues wikileaks had with tech and submissions and how they overcame these challenges.

[mschuster91]

The problem is that you can't really "vet" stuff like "Official Mr. XYZ demanded payment of US$ 20 so that I can get the permit faster".

Vetting a leak is easy. Vetting an accusation of bribery is next to impossible unless you're an undercover policeman and catch the bribed person red-handed (or, the building/exchange place is under CCTV surveillance).

[bertil]

The point is to identify officials who would do it ordinarily: his service can respond that no one else has mentioned that official, and encourage their users to ask a friend to testify too. More than establish a proof that could be legally binding for local institutions (a long shot) it will encourage people to consider how many friends are influenced, and would be ready to do something. Just talking about filling in a form, no matter how empty that process can be, sets them in a changing path. What the original comment was pointing out is to set up process to avoid adversaries of his service to discredit him by posting fake accusation, and ‘showing’ how wrong his service is; ‘vetting’ it indeed hard, but you don't need hard proof to fight endemic corruption.