Journalist VPS in Iceland for SecureDrop and Source Protection

The Modern Media Initiative passed by the Althing in 2010 codifies source protection in Article 25 of the Media Act and limits the conditions under which a court can compel a journalist or intermediary to reveal sources. Combined with Act 73/1972 on privacy and the absence of mandatory data retention, this creates a legal stack that maps well to the SecureDrop workflow: anonymous source submits documents, journalist accesses them through an air gapped workflow, the underlying VPS host has no statutory duty to capture connection metadata.

SecureDrop runs as a Tor hidden service on the public side and a journalist workstation on the air gapped side. The Iceland VPS hosts the Tor hidden service back end with full disk encryption, no swap, journald volatile and the SecureDrop application running under hardened systemd directives. Source submitted documents are encrypted at rest with a code name based key and copied through an air gapped USB workflow to the journalist workstation. Anubiz Host does not have access to the LUKS passphrase if you configure it correctly.

Standard at 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM and 60 GB NVMe at 16 USD per month for a small SecureDrop instance. Pro at 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM at 32 USD per month for a newsroom with active tip flow. Premium at 8 vCPU, 16 GB RAM at 55 USD per month for an outlet running multiple drop boxes or large document store. KVM with full disk encryption at provision, IPv4, IPv6, crypto only billing.

Configure LUKS at install with a passphrase you provide over an out of band encrypted channel. Disable serial console access. Use Tor v3 onion service with a vanity address. Maintain a separate workstation for source decryption, never on the VPS itself. Use the Anubiz Host snapshot feature for fast restoration after incidents. Newsrooms should pair the Iceland VPS with a Romania backup for jurisdictional diversity in case of legal pressure in one country.