Freedom of the Press Foundation

Freedom of the Press Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting and defending public-interest journalism through the development of secure, open-source technology. Operating from its publicly available code repositories, the foundation builds tools designed to protect journalists, whistleblowers, and human rights defenders from digital threats, with a particular focus on secure communications and safe document handling. Its flagship utility in this catalog is Dangerzone, a desktop application that addresses a common and serious security problem: the risk of opening potentially malicious files received from untrusted sources. Dangerzone takes potentially dangerous PDFs, office documents, or images and converts them into safe PDFs that can be opened without exposing the user's system to embedded malware. The software achieves this by running the conversion process inside isolated, sandboxed containers, opening the original document in a controlled environment, rendering it into pixel data, and then reconstructing it as a clean PDF, thereby stripping out any active malicious content. Typical use cases include journalists verifying leaked documents from anonymous sources, activists receiving attachments from unknown senders, and researchers examining files that could be weaponized against their computers. The tool fits within the broader category of endpoint security and document sanitization software, sometimes referred to as content disarm and reconstruction, and is designed to be accessible to non-technical users who nonetheless face elevated digital risk. Dangerzone is available for major desktop operating systems, reflecting the publisher's mission to make strong security practical for everyday newsroom workflows and civil society organizations that routinely handle sensitive material from confidential contacts.