this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
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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:

  1. No single point of failure. (aka a usb can be stolen, your family can be killed, etc)
  2. Make the existence of the switch public. (aka make sure people know of your mutually assured destruction)
  3. Secrets should be safe until you die, disappear, or otherwise choose to make them public.

Anyway, how would you go about it?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 40 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

There are very few situations where a dead man's switch would have helped these whistleblowers.

Once they have gone public and are at risk of being "suicided" they should have already released everything they knew. Sitting on it after already going public in any way only helps if the goal is to blackmail or extort the company, rather than to expose the company or protect others.

A lot of people have latched onto the idea of a dead man's switch (and I get it, technical solutions are fun to create), but the only part of the scenario it would help is before the whistleblower goes public, while they are still gathering information and haven't yet been discovered by the company. Even then, it wouldn't protect them from being killed, it would only ensure that the partial work is released in case they were discovered and prevented from finishing it.

[โ€“] [email protected] 25 points 4 days ago (3 children)

A "live-man's switch" might be a better idea. If you're in such a high profile situation and you're scared enough that you think you need a dead man's switch, make frequent unprompted public declarations that you're healthy and not suicidal, and that should anything happen to you, you blame the company.

[โ€“] [email protected] 11 points 3 days ago

Btw, that sounds a lot like warrant canaries, where you say that no subpoena orders were recieved as of the date xxxx and if it doesn't get updated it means that a subpoena was recieved.

Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary

An example of a canary from the web mail service cock.li: https://cock.li/canary.asc.txt

[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago

Interesting!

make frequent unprompted public declarations that you're healthy and not suicidal

Iโ€™ve worried that this could be abused

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

Didn't help McAfee