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Me and some colleagues are not happy with some events in our company. We'd like to prepare a whitepaper (maybe not the correct term) for the management so that they become aware about the things that go wrong.

While we prepare that, we would like to keep it secret, so we avoid Email, Skype etc. which are potentially under control of our employer. Therefore I'm looking for a tool that we can use for communication and that supports plausible deniability.

A chat-like program would be ideal, but an Email-like program would certainly do as well.

Such a tool would need to work on Windows 10, be gratis, ideally be portable and work offline (as far as possible; it should definitely not be a website; of course message exchange might use Internet routing).

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    Generic gmail account, share user/pass, edit mails and save as drafts. Never actually send any of them. Or a VPS accessed via SSH, edit a text document or use Linux internal mail system to mail eachother on the local machine only. – ivanivan Feb 14 '18 at 16:53
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You do not make it clear how you will communicate electronically. And I would not recommend just passing a USB stick around, as Word, etc, will leave traces of documents on your (work?) PCs.

DO NOT use the company LAN or Wifif. That leaves only your own data plan for smartphones.

WhatsApp is end to end encrypted, but it's probably no good for a large document.

You could use MS Word for Android, and email the document between yourselves (using your own private data plans). Or am I missing something?

Wanting (Danger, Will Robinson!) : DO NOT pass even one line for a single company document, as using it for non work related porpoises could be construed as theft.

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    Thanks for your efforts writing this. I'm not sure I understood everything. "You do not make it clear how you will communicate electronically": I mentioned chat or email-like. "traces of documents on your (work?) PCs": indeed. There are tools to mitigate this (e.g. CleanAfterMe) and as you mentioned data must not leave the company, so I have to use the work PC - no other choice. "your own data plan for smartphones": somehow contradicts the item before. Well, I could write the document on my work PC and use smartphone for chat with others. Is that what you suggest? – Thomas Weller Feb 14 '18 at 12:26
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    We can use private smartphones for the chat part. The document will be new, but it needs citation and references from company documents, so it contains company data. I don't want that on the smartphone. – Thomas Weller Feb 14 '18 at 13:00
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    Sorry for being unclear. In contrast to other questions, this thing is new to me and it's hard for me to judge what's relevant or not. I'll update my question later. – Thomas Weller Feb 14 '18 at 13:02
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    "it needs citation and references from company documents, so it contains company data. I don't want that on the smartphone" - and I do not blame you. I would strongly advice that you talk to a lawyer before you proceed. You *might have some sort of whistle blower protection. But it is still possible that they accuse you of misuse/theft of company property. Be careful – Mawg says reinstate Monica Feb 16 '18 at 9:36
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    I'll propose to use a VM without network access for editing the documents, so the traces are within the VM only and the VM can be reset to a clean snapshot. The documents can be mounted from a virtual hard disk file which contains a TrueCrypt container. I'll propose to do most work as a team after work hours so we don't have merge conflicts. People can randomly book meeting rooms for that and nobody will officially be invited. The invitation then goes via private phones. – Thomas Weller Feb 17 '18 at 11:55

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