Hacker News Reader

Comment by ianterrell | Hacker News Reader

I interpret this as it's protected in such a way that any information he can give is not sufficient to access the documents.

(copy pasted from my reply on another comment below)

View on HN

Agreed. The specificity of his claim seems to support that, as well:

>I cannot be coerced...

vs. "won't", "would never", et. al.

How would that work though? Wouldn't it mean that in order to access the info he is talking about, you need something more than knowledge he has in his head - like physical access to something?

But then, in the worst case scenario - how could Snowden access it himself if he needs the documents?

Perhaps it's more of a way to destroy data than to not reveal it, like maybe some sort of dead-man's switch. If he doesn't maintain some routine, then perhaps some data or documents gets automatically destroyed.

A very simple way to achieve something like this is to generate a random password, print it out and give half to someone else. Then you need 2 people to access the file.

Perhaps there are scenarios I am not thinking of then but then in order to access the documents/information, he would need to be able to freely communicate with the other party. If he was to be detained somewhere without outside contact the world, then how can the info be disseminated to fulfill his threat?

A verbal agreement akin to a killswitch. No verifiable contact by august 5th? Info dump to pastebin. Resets every two weeks.

It doesn't then take much torture to extract the other person's name. Then a little more torture for the other party to get the missing piece of the puzzle.

If those people are in different countries (e.g. one in the U.S. and one in China) then it is not possible to get them.

Especially not if he also has a killswitch which will go off once he disappears. The question is if said killswitch exists will it release the data or destroy it?

Why would he know their name? Why wouldn't they have a similar group of people-switches arranged in a hierarchy?

This is my belief.

Spread the password and access details to two people without keeping it yourself. Those two people split their in half without keeping it themselves. The four people who now have the password are the 'kill switch' required to monitor Snowden's location. Snowden has no idea who they are.

Should he be tortured, all he can do is reveal his first two contacts. The torturer will now have to abduct those two people to get the key.

All these second level people know is the two people THEY spoke to. So you need BOTH of the second level to get all four of the third level people.

And then you'll have to abduct another FOUR people to get the key. All before these four people realize Snoden has disappeared.

He knows he can't resist torture. But he doesn't have to. He LITERALLY cannot be coerced.

Then better, he gives two halves to at least 4 people (2 copies of each half, to prevent "denial of opening" if one person is blocked) he keeps nothing. He personally doesn't need the data. Publicly interesting things are by journalists. The "don't try to kill me" data is at best when not by him at all.

I posit there's nothing earth shaking on his own notebooks anymore.

I think that as well. If I knew I were going to go on the run and be in custody in unknown countries, I wouldn't want to be traveling with anything secret on my person. Get the data all distributed however you want before you go, and just have your laptop for communication. The press always says he has 4 government laptops. Why would you want to carry them around?

If I remember, nobody authoritatively claimed that he took anything else physical but copied the secret data to the USB stick. If he had to use a stick then there were never notebooks with secret data that he could take.

Some article somewhere mentioned that he carries 4 notebooks, and then the press started fear mongering and compromiting him by insinuating that the notebooks are full of secrets and government property. Can anybody quote an official claim that the notebooks aren't his own?

Similar suggestion to what's proposed here:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/laptop_securit...

But then... why wouldn't he say that more precisely?

If I had my documents encrypted with keys that I'd distributed to multiple parties, I'd be shouting it from the rooftops: "No point torturing me, the key is in three pieces and if I don't sign in every week the data will be destroyed so realistically you can't possibly seize all the pieces in the time-frame you'd require! Of course, if you can get all the pieces, just stick us all together in the same room and I promise to give you my piece, so no point torturing me then either."

Seems like there'd be a really strong incentive to have people know you had a mechanism that ensured it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com