Mission Statement

Darknet Diaries produces audio stories specifically intended to capture, preserve, and explain the culture around hacking and cyber security in order to educate and entertain both technical and non-technical audiences.

We adhere to journalistic standards by fact checking and ethical sourcing of information. We adopt principles of truthfulness, accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, fairness, and public accountability.

The total service should be trustworthy, enhance intellectual development, expand knowledge, deepen aural enjoyment, increase the awareness of living in a highly technical society, and result in a service to listeners which makes them more responsive, informed citizens of their digital lives.

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Team

Jack Rhysider

The show is created by Jack Rhysider. Jack created the show because he wanted a show like this to exist but couldn’t find one. So he made it. The first episode was released in October 2017.

For about the first 40 episodes, Jack did almost all of the work solo. Occasionally a graphic designer would make some episode art, or a friend would listen to an episode and provide critique before going live. But all of the research, writing, narrating, editing, sound design, publishing, marketing, and logistics was done by Jack. Around episode 40 is when the show started turning a profit which allowed the ability to hire additional writers, researchers, editors, and graphic designers.

Jack Rhysider is a veteran to the security world. He gained his professional knowledge of security by working in a Security Operations Center for a Fortune 500 company, a place where threats are detected and stopped. During that time he became familar with hundreds of client’s networks ranging from schools, to government, to banks, and commercial organizations.

Jack blogs about podcasting sometimes at Lime.Link. He has appeared on numerous other podcasts.

Contact:
@jackrhysider

jack@darknetdiaries.com

Artwork

Jack typically creates the concept sketches for the artwork then works with a few artists to bring them to life.

odibagas created much of the artwork you see on this site.

Ross Branchette has created some artwork for the site.

Other Team Members

Damienne takes out all the flubs and redos from Jack’s narration.

Andrew Merriwether adds music to some episodes.

Garrett Tiedemann creates original music and scores some episodes.

Fiona Guy has written a handful of episodes.

Proximity Sound mixes the show.

Breakmaster Cylinder made the opening theme song and the closing credit theme.

Leah Hurvoloy transcribes every episode.

Tristan Ledger assembles episodes.

Additional producers have been Christian Green, Charles Bolte, Jake Warga, Eileen Guo, and Ilana Strauss.

tarballqc and Starfox707 moderate the Discord community as well as the subreddit.

Storage Procedures

After publishing an episode, our pattern and practice is to destroy source material used to create that episode. This means, besides what gets published, no other source material or original interviews are kept or archived.