I spent time having video calls with LEOs, intelligence agents and military folks over the course of the past 6-9 months. I saw how broken and disjointed and tribal power has become within the world of American authority.
I now know things about how the US government and military work that I feel the public should know.
I could write a book or make a YouTube video. But both of those are to inflexible and risky. I want to spill the beans in a much more permanent and effective way. I would like to help the public understand what is really going on behind the scenes, as best as I have seen.
Snowden gave the information to reporters and then tried to make his way to a non-extradition country. The U.S. canceled his passport, he got stuck in Russia. My advice, get to your destination first, and then say something. Many media outlets have a way to upload documents anonymously to protect sources.
Could also put it in the mail
A thumb drive in the mail, sure. Too many things can go wrong printing off the docs and mailing those.
SD card. Thumb drives are too easy to have malware. Nobody should plug in an unfamiliar thumb drive.
There’s zero functional difference between an SD card and a USB stick as far as malware. Don’t plug in any unfamiliar data storage device.
Generally news orgs and the like who have a real reason to receive a thumbdrive with important docs from random people will have a method of mitigating the risk. For example, a former client who was a tax preparer had a dedicated laptop which was firewalled off from the network and could only access a document web portal to upload files from the flash drive as their mitigation strategy
Turn it into a waveform and sing it to a pigeon?