The NSA spying scandal is continuing to make headlines, and the recent news about the severe safety loopholes exposed by Heartbleed is frightening. And yet for many the threat remains worryingly rather abstract.

A recent survey in Germany found that the vast majority (75 percent) of Germans have not changed their behavior when it comes to personal data. Every second person still believes they have nothing to hide. Even if journalists have become more sensitized to digital safety, most still don’t know what PGP or OTR means. The topic is however of the utmost importance, not only to protect journalists themselves, but more importantly, their sources.

This is precisely the reason why the DW Akademie organized an open online workshop on digital safety last December. The topic is also now an integral part of Deutsche Welle’s own journalism training.

The biggest challenge by far is not about teaching and demonstrating tools, but rather to convince journalists to actually change their behavior and the way they communicate.

Journalism training has to be carefully reconsidered, says DW Akademie’s Steffen Leidel. Here are Steffen’s digital safety training tips for journalists presented during his talk at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia.

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Many governments agencies around the world collect communications data as a matter of course. In the past, governments have downplayed privacy concerns around this data collection by emphasizing that they don’t collect the actual content of communications but rather so-called “metadata” – that is, the number called, what time the call was made, how long the call was and where the call was made from. A number of recent studies have demonstrated, yet again, that this metadata can be incredibly revealing.

And this is where journalists need to pay attention because if they want to keep a story they’re investigating under wraps or protect contacts, they need to understand how their metadata can be used to discover their activities and movements.

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