James Dolan is dead

In January 2013, Aaron Swartz [...] committed suicide as the US government was attempting to prosecute him for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act related to allegedly copying academic articles from JSTOR. SecureDrop was an unrelated side project he was working on at the time. A few months after Aaron’s tragic death, Kevin Poulsen donated [Swaqrtz'] SecureDrop project to FPF, in the hopes that we could revive it and get it in a place where more news organizations could use it.

At that point, James was literally the only person in the world who knew all the ins and outs of the system, how to install it, and how to make it better. He had a high-paying computer security job at a large company by then, but I asked him if he’d be willing to come work for us so we could try to get SecureDrop into more newsrooms. We had hardly any money at the time, yet he immediately agreed—even though it meant taking an 80% pay cut. (Later, he would even refuse to accept a raise, insisting that we use any new funding to hire additional people to work on the project instead.)

He was our first full-time employee at Freedom of the Press Foundation, and quickly set out to teach other developers, contributors, and anyone interested in how the system worked.

[...]

James’s encyclopedic knowledge of computer and network security was a key reason why newsrooms were comfortable adopting SecureDrop when it was still seen as something relatively new and unknown.

James left FPF in August of 2015 after he felt the project was in a place where it could survive without him. Ever since, he had been working on the security team at Classy, a crowdfunding site for non-profit organizations located in San Diego.

[...]

We don’t know why James took his own life; we do know, however, he long suffered from PTSD from his time serving in the Marines during the Iraq War. It was an experience that affected him in multiple ways. He often cited the Iraq War as his inspiration for wanting to help journalists and whistleblowers; it made him realize governments needed to be much more transparent and accountable.

[...]

It is impossible to overstate how fundamentally important James Dolan was to the development of both Freedom of the Press Foundation and SecureDrop. We are heartbroken he is gone, but we are also eternally grateful to have known and worked with him.

  Freedom of the Press

Yeah, I'm beginning to wonder about Swartz' suicide now, too. He was also said to be depressed. Understandably. But, now Dolan?