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?

  • tetris11@lemmy.ml
    0·
    12 days ago

    The most non-intrusive foolproof method I can think of is spite-induced action:

    1. Get a pacemaker with Zigbee mesh network connectivity
    2. Implant a small device into your wrist that vibrates if your pacemaker is ever disconnected from the network (in which case, run NOW to your nearest safehouse)
    3. Should the vibration continue for longer than 5 minutes, a vial of cyanide from a hollow tooth explodes into your mouth allowing you to spit it at your nearest enemy (should one be around)
    4. The bursting of the hollow tooth sends a signal to a remote server, which triggers the eject command on a server, causing the CD tray to come out.
    5. A confused sysadmin will bitterly get off his chair, and go inspect the server, whereupon he will see the paper instructions embedded in the CD tray, and read them.
    6. Assuming his latvian is good, and that he’s familiar with caesar cyphers, he will decode the message that will lead him to a youtube URL where he will post the following comment “Jose I slept with your mother.”
    7. One of the subscribers to the youtube channel is your friend Jose, who will read the comment, spit out his coffee, and then immediately call you.
    8. After about a week of no response, he uploads the contents of that USB stick you gave him with the instructions to “never upload this ever under any circumstance” out of sheer spite.