A new encrypted, open-source tool created by Aspen Institute policy scholars could streamline and dramatically improve the whistleblower antitrust complaint process within the Federal Trade Commission.

Currently, the FTC uses a simple and less secure email process for antitrust whistleblower complaints, which four tech scholars at the Aspen Institute want to revolutionize with a new proposed user interface. The researchers say the tool could improve the collection of whistleblower reports of anti-competitive corporate behavior.

Collecting evidence of competition law violations from employees is a key part of the FTC’s enforcement action. Such evidence is crucial as increasingly complex algorithms and code within commercial products make anticompetitive behavior harder to detect.

The Aspen scholars—Arjun Hassard, Justino Mora, Julia Uhr, and Ritvik Vasudevan—are pushing the FTC to deploy their “smart and secure reporting channel,” according to their policy brief, to allow better communication between FTC staff and whistleblower informants using an open source code platform.

“When we showed it to them the FTC was very impressed with what we built,” said Arjun Hassard, the lead author of the Aspen policy brief and a creator of the proposed FTC whistleblower tool.

“They said the prototype made a lot of sense so we hope that it will be used in FTC cases in the future especially since the FTC is underfunded and this tool is pretty cheap to maintain given that it’s built on open...

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