this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
182 points (97.9% liked)

Asklemmy

44331 readers
1032 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

All good points, however the purpose of a deadman's switch is that you fear for your life, taking a nap might not be as easy under those circumstances. Also, if you know at what time the SMS is set to arrive you can plan ahead to make sure you have Internet in order to respond, but OK maybe 60 seconds is too short of a time so let's make it 5 minutes. Being that this is using Google Voice, you can receive the SMS over a tablet or laptop so a backup would be a must have.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Even 5 minutes seems short. You're already dead, what's the rush?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

You don't want to give the people chasing you time to identify and disable the deadmans switch

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

That’s why you create a backup deadman’s switch.