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Most questions do not need any of this. If you are a resident asking about a budget line, a reporter checking a filing, or an official who wants a second read on a contract, ordinary email is fine and contact@silentinvestigative.com is the fastest route.
The rest of this page is for the other situation — where it matters that no one knows you made contact, because you still work there, because you signed something, or because the subject of the question has more resources than you do.
Read this before you send anything sensitive
Anonymous channels are not yet available. A Signal number and an encrypted email address are being set up and will be published on this page when they are live. Until then, the only ways to reach Silent Investigative are ordinary email and the form on the home page — and both of those identify you.
That is stated here rather than glossed over, because the alternative is someone taking a real risk on a channel that could not carry it.
If your safety, your job, or your legal position depends on staying anonymous, do not use email or the form. Wait until the encrypted channels are listed here, or take the matter to a newsroom or oversight body that already runs a secure tip line. That is better advice than anything that would keep your submission here.
What ordinary email and web forms give away
Email carries your address, your provider, and usually your IP address. A web form records the IP address of the device that submitted it, along with the time. Both live on servers belonging to companies that will comply with a valid subpoena or court order, and neither Silent Investigative nor you will necessarily be told when that happens.
This is not a reason to panic. It is a reason to pick the channel on purpose rather than by default.
What is safe to send by email today
- Anything already public. A link to a filing, a budget PDF, a meeting agenda, a news story, a parcel number. Pointing at a public document reveals nothing about you that matters.
- A question, without the documents. "Has anyone looked at how the X contract was awarded?" is a useful message and gives away nothing about how you know to ask.
- Your own records. Documents you are plainly entitled to hold and share.
What is not safe to send by email is anything that would identify you as its source if the message were later read by someone you did not choose.
Practical precautions
- Use your own device and your own network. Employer laptops, phones, email accounts, and wifi are routinely logged and lawfully monitored. Assume anything done on them is visible to the employer.
- Do not browse this site from work. The same logging applies to browsing.
- Send only documents you are allowed to have. This protects you far more than it protects anyone else.
- Strip metadata where you can. Photos carry location and device data; office documents carry author names and revision history.
- Do not tell colleagues. The most common way a confidential source is identified is that they mentioned it to one person they trusted.
- Consider a lawyer first if you are covered by an NDA, a security clearance, or a whistleblower statute. Some protections only apply if you report through a specific channel in a specific order — and reporting the wrong way first can cost you them.
What not to send
Do not send classified or national-security information. Do not send material obtained by breaking into a system, an account, or a locked file. Do not send information you are contractually or legally barred from disclosing without first getting advice about what that bar actually covers.
Material of that kind will not be used, and its arrival creates legal exposure for the sender that Silent Investigative cannot absorb or undo.
What is promised, and what is not
Promised: your identity is protected to the fullest extent permitted by law. Source identity is not shared with subjects, clients, or the public. Nothing is published or forwarded to an authority because it was submitted — it is published or forwarded only if it can be independently substantiated from the record.
Not promised: absolute confidentiality. No one can honestly promise that. Silent Investigative is not a law firm and there is no attorney–client privilege here. Reporter's-privilege and shield-law protections vary by state and by circumstance and have limits. Where disclosure is compelled by a valid court order, that is a fact of the legal system rather than a policy choice.
The single most reliable protection is the one you control: if no channel ever recorded that you made contact, there is nothing to compel.
What happens after you send something
Every submission is read. Not every submission becomes a case — most do not, usually because the public record cannot answer the question or because the time is not there. You may not receive a reply, and silence is not a judgment about the tip.
If a tip does become a case, it is worked the same way every other case is worked: primary sources first, material claims checked against a second independent record, and what stays unknown said plainly. Where the evidence establishes a documented basis for further inquiry, findings may be referred to the appropriate oversight body, regulator, law-enforcement agency, or news organization. That recipient decides what happens next.
Last updated 25 August 2026