The foundation's SecureDrop platform aims to allow confidential and secure communication between journalists and their sources, and has been adopted by more than 65 news organizations globally.

[4] The organization's board of directors has included prominent journalists and whistleblowers such as Daniel Ellsberg, Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and Xeni Jardin, as well as activists, celebrities, and filmmakers.

[10][11] FPF has also crowd-funded support for a variety of other transparency journalism organizations, as well as encryption tools used by journalists, including: WikiLeaks, MuckRock, the National Security Archive, The UpTake, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the Center for Public Integrity, Truthout, the LEAP Encryption Access Project, Open Whisper Systems, Tails, and the Tor Project.

[17] In 2015, FPF raised more than $125,000 in online donations for Chelsea Manning's legal defense stemming from her conviction under the Espionage Act for leaking information to WikiLeaks.

This signed work, titled "Stay Free", combines the entirety of a landmark court decision ruling the National Security Agency's mass surveillance violated the law, with the portrait of the whistleblower by Platon.

[26] In 2022, FPF took over the development of Dangerzone, a free software tool that converts potentially harmful documents into safe PDF files.

In January 2016, FPF's lawsuit against the Justice Department revealed that the US government has secret rules for targeting journalists with National Security Letters (NSLs) and FISA court orders.