Privacy-preserving citizen journalism

Abstract

The scenario in which the public plays a role in collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news is defined as citizen journalism. However, a citizen may not want to disclose his/her identity while reporting the news especially in countries with news censorship. In this paper, based on the framework of mobile data network, we propose a novel secure and privacy-preserving scheme for citizens to anonymously take part in citizen journalism. With our scheme, a citizen can take a photo and sell it to buyers like news agencies without revealing his/her identity. This is made possible using the techniques of blind signature, anonymous credential and anonymous virtual mailbox. Besides privacy preservation, we also take care of security features like authentication and message confidentiality. Through security analysis, we show that our scheme is effective. Through implementation, we show that our scheme is practical for implementation on any network-enabled digital device. It is also shown that the processing time and transmission time overhead induced by our security measures is only marginal.