After reading about the “suicide” of yet another whistleblower, it got me thinking.
When working at large enough company, it’s entirely possible that at some point you will get across some information the company does not want to be made public, but your ethics mandate you blow the whistle. So, I was wondering if I were in that position how I would approach creating a dead man’s switch in order to protect myself.
From wikipedia:
A dead man’s switch is a switch that is designed to be activated or deactivated if the human operator becomes incapacitated, such as through death, loss of consciousness, or being bodily removed from control. Originally applied to switches on a vehicle or machine, it has since come to be used to describe other intangible uses, as in computer software.
In this context, a dead man’s switch would trigger the release of information. Some additional requirements could include:
- No single point of failure. (aka a usb can be stolen, your family can be killed, etc)
- Make the existence of the switch public. (aka make sure people know of your mutually assured destruction)
- Secrets should be safe until you die, disappear, or otherwise choose to make them public.
Anyway, how would you go about it?
Just a scheduled email that you need to cancel every 24 hours.
That more like coalmine canary than dead man switch. Also, if you happen to be arrested on a weekend or get tangled/hooked up then you will have no way of cancelling it. Then all hell breaks loose.
Make it 60-72 hours and your death will still be fresh enough for it to be relevant, but plenty of time to figure out how to work around whatever calamity might prevent still-alive you from stopping it. It’s even enough time that if your death makes the news it’ll have been seen by most relevant journalists and newsrooms already so they’ll have more context for the strange email they find
Could set it up like every month. It’s what I would do anyway, simple enough to set up. Low chance of anyone being able to do anything about it