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Comment by guan | Hacker News Reader

He could also distribute encrypted versions to a bunch of confederates, and have the dead man switch send them the encryption key (but not release it to the public). That way he both has to be dead and the confederates have to be satisfied that the documents ought to be released before they are published.

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Let's say he has N friends who have agreed to help. He doesn't want to allow any single individual to have the power to act alone and release information. And, he doesn't want to require all N of them to act together. What if one dies, is arrested, etc.? Could he encrypt the documents with, say, all combinations of three friends' own public keys such that a quorum of three friends would have to cooperate in the release? He would end up publishing N choose 3 bundles.

He doesn't have to make separate encrypted copies - all he needs to do is encrypt it with one master key, and split the master key between his confederates with a secret sharing scheme[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing

Just curious here -- how would a dead man's switch be created?

I'm thinking something like a python script which is scanning for particular words and phrases on google news, like "Snowden killed", or "Snowden captured"? That seems like something I could build easily -- would a kill switch indeed be something as simple as that?

You could have a server running a timer that needs to be reset periodically and can only be reset by the person with the password.

How about a script that watches for such phrases (perhaps using Google Alerts), which sets off a timer for the release of the key. Then Snowden could disable it if there's a false positive.

The only problem is, that complicates the system with a critical point of failure.

My understanding is that's exactly what he's done. He's already distributed the encrypted documents, the kill switch will distribute the key.

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