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Government Security Idle

Service Promises To Leak Your Documents If the Government Murders You 98

Posted by samzenpus from the if-anything-happens-to-me dept.
Jason Koebler writes With all the conspiracy theories surrounding some high-profile deaths in recent years, how can you, theoretical whistleblower with highly sensitive documents, be assured that your information gets leaked if you're murdered in some government conspiracy? A new dark web service says it's got your back. "Dead Man Zero" claims to offer potential whistleblowers a bit more peace of mind by providing a system that will automatically publish and distribute their secrets should they die, get jailed, or get injured.
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Service Promises To Leak Your Documents If the Government Murders You More

Service Promises To Leak Your Documents If the Government Murders You

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  • Is there such thing as independent hosting? You will be sharing your secrets with whatever jurisdiction the site is under. Does the service say which country is that?
    • Upload the file(s) as a single encrypted image file. Break that image into stripes. Store each stripe and the decryption key in a different legal jurisdiction? Not foolproof but it does make it more difficult for a single entity.

      • But then stopping any of the stripes will stop the entire revelation.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

          Not if they're RAID-style stripes, where you can reconstruct the data from n-1 or n-2 stripes.

          • You don't even have to split the image, you can split the key using the Shamir's Secret Sharing algorithm, which gives you a way to split information into any N pieces with a minimum of M pieces necessary to reconstruct it for any M = N (or some similar secret splitting method with the same properties). That seems much more practical to me, and you can simply keep redundant data copies around since nobody will have access to the clear text without the key anyway.

        • But then stopping any of the stripes will stop the entire revelation.

          OK. That's not the problem I was trying to address, but I think striping can help here too.

          Rather than an additive approach use a subtractive approach. For instance instead of each site having only 1 of 3 pieces, it has 2 of 3 pieces - 1 piece missing. Each site is missing some number of stripes, so a single entity can not read on its own. However there would be redundancy in that any particular stripe is in more than one jurisdiction. So coordination between jurisdictions is need for both release and de

        • Then I'd recommend some sort of RAID 5 scenario, where distributed parity allows for the image to be maintained even when one stripe is missing.

      • Post to USENET, it'll still be on servers everywhere for another decade.

        The trick is releasing the decryption key upon your death.

      • Upload the file(s) as a single encrypted image file. Break that image into stripes. Store each stripe and the decryption key in a different legal jurisdiction? Not foolproof but it does make it more difficult for a single entity.

        If you do that, how is the site supposed to publish your documents in the event of your death? They're going to have to get access to the data so they can do the job.

        • Upload the file(s) as a single encrypted image file. Break that image into stripes. Store each stripe and the decryption key in a different legal jurisdiction? Not foolproof but it does make it more difficult for a single entity.

          If you do that, how is the site supposed to publish your documents in the event of your death? They're going to have to get access to the data so they can do the job.

          You only do the uploading of the image. The service does the striping and jurisdictionally diverse storage.

          • Re:Hosted in the US? (Score:4, Insightful)

            by rioki ( 1328185 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @03:15AM (#47971805) Homepage

            This is exactly the problem. Sure you could devise a scheme that would be reasonably safe. But the moment you rely on somebody else to do it and you hand him over the entire lot in the clear you are lost. That is the high value place where you can bet all your fortune on the fact that the NSA/CIA will have tapped that spot. For me this kind of service looks like a "whistleblower detection service" for the NSA/CIA. Even if they don't reed the data (they don't need to), they can detect any would be whistleblowers by monitoring the communication channels. One they have a fix on the individual they can talk to them about patriotism and possible health issues of their loved ones.

            • Even if they don't reed the data (they don't need to)

              Yeah, who needs a flutist when you're already a whistleblower?

    • Re:Hosted in the US? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Jeremiah Cornelius ( 137 ) on Monday September 22, 2014 @06:32PM (#47969829) Homepage Journal

      1, 2, 3, (deep breath)...

      "HONEYPOT!"

  • False flag ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by perpenso ( 1613749 ) on Monday September 22, 2014 @06:07PM (#47969645)
    Probably a false flag operation to identify potential whistleblowers. :-)

  • Relevant 1984 analog (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    See The Brotherhood

  • ... a money back guarantee.

  • ...that they won't sell your info to the highest bidder? Especially if it is juicy. Or as mentioned, it could be a false flag.

    What is needed is a two piece dead man switch. Storage that is encrypted, and a second party to hold the keys. Preferably the two parties do not know each other. Then in your will you instruct the key-holder to send the keys to the storage provider.

    This is more complex and more likely to fail in the event of your death, but after that while it may be nice if your info is outed

  • ...nah, somebody's already got it parked.

  • Encourages the opposite too (Score:4, Interesting)

    by orange_account ( 904027 ) on Monday September 22, 2014 @06:43PM (#47969895)
    Wouldn't there also be a group of people (not the government) that might want those secrets out? This gives them a reason to kill you with a guarantee that they get what they want.

  • Holy Honeypot Batman! (Score:3)

    by Irate Engineer ( 2814313 ) on Monday September 22, 2014 @06:51PM (#47969941)
    Upload all your incriminating evidence to who knows where, and then leave enough contact information for them to determine if you are dead or not? Ummm yeah....no. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks this sounds like a fiendishly clever way for the NSA to quickly weed out 95% of the wack-jobs out there that style themselves as the next Edward Snowden so they could devote their efforts to tracking the truly competent activists. I could also see these wackjobs getting an email at their AOL accounts soon afterwards worded something like this:

    Dear Dead Man Zero Subscriber, Thank you for uploading to Dead Man Zero! We're watching. Have a Nice Day! The NSA

    Anybody truly paranoid and knowledgeable would not touch this with a 10 ft pole.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Even if they are legit, by advertising they have made themselves known to the government and a national security letter is already on its way.

  • It's not that hard to arrange for info to be distributed should something happen to me.

  • Duress password (Score:3)

    by arobatino ( 46791 ) on Monday September 22, 2014 @07:16PM (#47970095)

    There should be a duress password [wikipedia.org] to indicate coercion.

  • More than an hour in and no one has even made a passing reference to 'My Socrates Note' yet?

    For shame....

    • - Setec. - What?

      Setec Astronomy.

      I just love it when a man says that to me.

      Setec doesn't mean anything.

  • This sort of idea can make you more valuable dead to those who want the information leaked in one massive hit, so it can be run through the 24 hour news wash and then forgotten.

  • So... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    What if a "foreign power" wants the information released? All they have to do is kill you.

    Isn't that why, allegedly, Snowden turned-over all his documents to journalists? So that if he's killed, there's no remaining stash of documents to be released upon his death?

  • Blackmail Use? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Irate Engineer ( 2814313 ) on Monday September 22, 2014 @07:42PM (#47970271)
    Read the Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton". Got the goods on someone? Upload them to Dead Man Zero, set the timer, and then go squeeze the victim. The victim won't retaliate as they then won't be able to stop the disclosure.

    • Read the Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton".

      Milverton was shot dead by one of his victims who wouldn't pay up and suffered accordingly, with Holmes instinctively tidying things up for her afterward.

      in Elementary, both blackmailer and accomplice are killed by a not-so-innocent victim who saw a chance to take their place.

      In "Sherlock," it is Holmes himself who pulls the trigger.

      The character of Charles Augustus Milverton was based on a real blackmailer, Charles Augustus Howell. He was an art dealer who preyed upon an unknown number of people, including the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

      Doyle's literary inspiration often came from his natural interest in crime, and he had no tolerance for predators. Howell died in 1890 in circumstances as strange as any of Doyle's novels: His body was found near a Chelsea public house with his throat posthumously slit, with a ten-shilling coin in his mouth. The presence of the coin was known to be a criticism of those guilty of slander.

      The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton [wikipedia.org]

      • There's a theory that, in Doyle's Sherlock universe, it was also Holmes who pulled the trigger. Watson was being discreet about it when he wrote it up. I forget the details, but I think there wasn't a very good reason for the shooter to have been present at that time.

  • This is a new government program. They do want to kill you, but they really want to know what you have first, just in case it is really damaging. By giving them your stuff, they can make an informed decision whether to murder you right away or possibly (although not likely) hold off for awhile.

  • Consider, Michael Crichton wrote a book in which the villains were a group of ecological alarmists. Then suddenly he dies at a young age from a previously undiagnosed cause, his book is pulled from publication and his personal web site is "cleansed" of his questions about the science of alarmist climate change (See Aliens Cause Global Warming). What details would have been leaked had he this service? We will never know.

  • Holding all the cards makes you the one everyone want to kill --- or crack wide open.
    The geek who can keep his big mouth shut outside the narrow bounds of the darknet is a rare beast indeed. If I held secrets hot enough to burn, my first instinct would be to publish them straight-way and slip away quietly in the ensuing chaos.

  • Someone wants you dead anyway. Particularly if they know that you know something they either don't want you to know or it getting out. Release it anyway, he's either going to kill you afterward or run for the hills (depending what it is). Consider yourself fortunate if he does the latter. Blackmail NEVER works.

  • Where a service promised to email personal messages to friends and family "left behind" after the rapture. The three members who founded it would log in every day, assuming that if at least two of them failed to log in, being god-fearing Christians, the rapture has occurred. You can see where this is going.

    .

  • This is from the same company I bought meteor insurance from.

  • That must run on dark fiber...
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... [wikipedia.org]

  • Curiously I can't seem to find the site. And there are very few "Dead Man Zero" hits on Google. The link in the main article doesn't get you there either. (I was going to ask them for a free account, just to foil the NSA or whoever if in fact this _was_ a honeypot.

  • The name of the website is TrustUsWereNotTheFBI.com
  • What is to prevent the Gov. from infiltrating "Dead Man Zero" and NSLing them into silence! The only way to ensure that the information gets out would be to have multiple storage site scattered around the various countries where the NSL, CIA, FBI and other TLAs don't have standing.

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