UnRedacted

Inspiration

Every major scandal of the last 25 years had an insider who knew. Most stayed silent.

Frances Haugen exposed Facebook's internal research and got sued. Reality Winner leaked an NSA document and went to federal prison. Sherron Watkins warned about Enron months before it imploded and was demoted. The EU passed a Whistleblower Protection Directive in 2019. 21% of EU whistleblowers still face retaliation, and the average US whistleblower spends over $300,000 defending themselves.

The problem isn't the law. It's the technology. Every "anonymous" channel keeps your identity somewhere: IP logs, account systems, session tokens, writing style. The platform operator becomes a single point of failure, and a subpoena finds it eventually.

We wanted to build the first whistleblowing platform where the operator cannot betray its users, not because we promise not to, but because we mathematically don't have the information to give away.

What it does

UnRedacted lets verified insiders publish reports of corruption, fraud, and scandals without revealing who they are.

Verification has two paths. A reporter proves insider status by receiving a one-time code at a work email or by uploading a payslip that an AI Vision model scores for authenticity. Either input is destroyed the instant the proof is issued.
AI scrubs identifying details in real time. As they type, the AI overlays black redaction bars on names, dates, employee IDs, internal team codes, and any phrase that could fingerprint the reporter. The company stays named. The reporter disappears.
A zero-knowledge proof is generated in the user's browser. Seven visible stages: Poseidon hash chain, Halo2 SNARK, local verification. Only the public commitment reaches the Midnight network. The private witness never leaves the tab.
Reports support anonymous threaded discussion. Reddit-style upvotes, replies, community flagging. Every comment is AI-scrubbed; five flags auto-hide pending review.
Reports are anchored permanently to Midnight's dual-state ledger. The platform operator cannot delete or alter them, even under subpoena.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The platform genuinely doesn't store identifying data. This wasn't bolted on. It was the design constraint from day one. The OTPSession document is deleted on verification. The payslip file is never written to disk. The Web Worker witness is dropped before the proof leaves the tab.
A visible, narratable ZK proof flow. Most ZK demos hide the cryptography behind a spinner. Ours shows seven labelled stages with real timings, real Poseidon hashes, and the final commitment hash on screen. Judges can see the math happening.
Two distinct identity-verification paths, one of which (AI Vision payslip credibility analysis) we haven't seen in any other anonymous-reporting tool.
Verbatim-span AI scrubbing instead of AI rewriting: verifiable, lossless, and produces a perfect line-wrap preview against the original.
A complete, polished, classified-document aesthetic end-to-end: animated redaction bars, document-corner marks on every card, stamp badges, top classification strip.
Reddit-style threaded anonymous comments with AI scrubbing and community moderation. Five flags auto-hide a comment while preserving thread structure.
A live, deployed, end-to-end working demo at https://un-redacted.vercel.app, not a video of a localhost demo.

What's next for UnRedacted

Deploy a real Compact contract to Midnight testnet. The integration seams are already marked. This is the highest-leverage next step.
Lace wallet integration as an optional path for users who want long-term proof ownership (current default is wallet-less and ephemeral).
K-anonymous corroboration. Don't show a corroboration count until at least 5 independent insiders have verified. This prevents inferring identities from sparse signals.
ZK proof of jurisdiction. Let reporters prove their country so reports anchor to local whistleblower legal frameworks, without revealing the country itself.
Indexed full-text search with field-level privacy. Searchable encrypted indices over redacted content.
Journalist verification portal. Read-only view with audit logging, so accredited journalists can vet patterns across reports without the public seeing the metadata.
Public bug bounty + formal security audit before any real reports are encouraged. We are explicit that the current version is hackathon-grade. No real whistleblower should use it yet.