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] 1 points 3 days ago (2 children)

You wanted to ruin your company? Why?

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

Ha well it was more of a "oh crap we need to bring him back ASAP" kinda thing to get my job back. And as others said this was all mainly for fun thinking about it. The intrusive thoughts

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

When did they say they wanted to ruin their company?

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The slowly corrupting and degrading everything part.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

But when did they say they wanted to do that? They just said they imagined it. I've imagined ways to screw over my workplace as well, it doesn't mean I want to

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I think you are being needlessly pedantic.

[โ€“] [email protected] -1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I'm not being pedantic at all. The entire premise of your question was them "wanting" to ruin their company. There's no other way to interpret that

If you want to rephrase what you said to clear up the confusion, I'm all ears