And to my delight, the article was written by Julia Angwin whose book

[1] J. Angwin. Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance. Times Books, 2014.

I recently finished and recommend. It's one of those few "books" written these days (quotation marks because they`re really more like stretched-out magazine articles) that actually make sense, come from the right place in terms of sentiment and tone, and most important are logical or coherent. I was curious about the author because I was so surprised and saw in her bio that she studied mathematics in college. Go figure ;-)

Yeah, without taking any credit away from the donors (or from the GPG authors, of course), we should be grateful to her and ProPublica for bringing this to light.

It kinda bothers me that, while I can make a donation to ProPublica, there's no way to express why I'm doing so. On the other hand, maybe there's a danger in becoming too donation-focused.

EDIT: After donating, they say: "Please consider sending a note to [email protected] or tweeting @ProPublica sharing your reason for donating. We’ll use some of these messages to encourage others to donate."

Which I think is fair enough.

Why cryptocurrency/cryptoempathy needs fields for attaching messages for meaning to value and account why we give.

Giving sharing significance and expressivity by allowing message passing for basic help as a fundamental part of currency.

Not to take away from the article, but this is like saying Yo-Yo Ma is so good at playing the Cello because he's talented.

He is talented, but that's not why he's good. He's good because of years of hard work, blood, sweat, and tears.

Most of the success of this campaign is due to Werner Koch's years of hard work. The article was the catalyst.

EDIT: I'm as grateful as the next guy for all the generous donors, to Propublica for publishing the article and to Julia Angwin for writing it. Let's just not forget who the real hero of this story is.

Claiming "most" is "due to" "years of hard work" sounds good but is far from enough to explain what actually happened.

See the state before the article was published:

https://gnupg.org/donate/kudos.html

   Donations for the previous years:
   Year 	# 	€ 	net €
   2011 	21 	553 	465
   2012 	53 	5991 	4963
   2013 	148 	5041 	4145
   2014 	801 	34700 	

Do you think Koch worked much less hard in 2011 or 2012? It's that Snowden's revelations raised awareness both among the potential supporters and by Koch himself (he claimed in the article he'd have quitted due to the "lack of support" hadn't had Snowden "happened") motivating him to continue working.

Then before the ProPublica article, the only known contributions were cca 30000 EUR (apparently the Linux Foundation grant was agreed but still not public). But just in exactly 24 hours since the ProPublica article was published, the contributions were 180000 EUR plus commitment from Facebook and Stripe for 50000 USD yearly each, plus the publishing of the Linux Foundation grant. People who did contribute on that day could see how the "goal bar" moved from "mostly empty" to "full" and above in a few hours.

I've uploaded the relevant part of the changelog for you.

http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=6meWbFYv

This case is a good example of plight of donation supported products and users unwillingness to support Volunteerily. If it wasn't the threat of project shutting down and the article about it, I doubt project would have recived the funding it did.

It also goes to show that Users are very bad at judging the value of a product and paying accordingly. They need to be provided an anchor price.

I believe this project will be a good case study for business of free and donation supported products.

Yep, let's hope the project gets in a better shape thanks to all these funds.