https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/guide_to_securedrop.php
By the time the SecureDrop project was first conceived in 2012, WikiLeaks itself was dealing with a staff mutiny, a shuttered submission system, and Julian Assange’s self-imposed exile. Disaffected former staff had launched a new project, OpenLeaks, but it failed to gain comparable traction. In short, there was not a clear successor, even as news audiences still had an appetite for the brand of radical transparency that WikiLeaks had pioneered. For Edward Snowden to orchestrate his leak of NSA documents, it was necessary for him to devise his own digital security scheme from publicly available tools. Using Tor, PGP encryption, an anonymous email service called LavaBit, and a well-timed getaway, Snowden engineered the safe delivery of the files to a handpicked selection of journalists during the early months of 2013, right when the first prototype of SecureDrop was launched as another solution to the momentary decline of WikiLeaks.