SHARED SECRETS

Psst is building a digital safe to protect tech whistleblowers from recrimination.

- BY VICTORIA TURK | PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALI CHERKIS

AMBER SCORAH KNOWS only too well that powerful stories can change society—and that powerful organizations will try to undermine those who tell them. In 2015, her 3-month-old son Karl died on his first day of day care. Heartbroken and furious that she hadn’t been with him, Scorah wrote an op-ed about the poor provision for parental leave in the US; her story helped New York City employees win their fight for improved family leave. In 2019 she wrote a memoir about leaving her tight-knit religion, the Jehovah's Witnesses, that exposed issues within the secretive organization. The book cost her friends and family members, but she heard from many people who had also been questioning some of the religion’s controversial practices.

Then, while working at a media outlet that connects whistleblowers with journalists, she noticed parallels in the coercive tactics used by groups trying to suppress information. “There is a sort of playbook that powerful entities seem to use over and over again,” she says. “You expose something about the powerful, they try to discredit you, people in your community may ostracize you.”

In September 2024, Scorah cofounded Psst, a nonprofit that helps people in the tech industry or the government share information of public interest with extra protections—with lots of options for specifying how the information gets used and how anonymous a person stays.