Brad Ideas - "Better hope nothing happens to me" service. - Comments

The money flow is hard

brad — Sun, 07 May 2006 17:23:57 -0700

Unless you truly can pay cash, it's hard to hide the money flow.

Plus, you may want a system which does not reveal the data when you truly die naturally. In that case, you might be able to disable it as you see yourself getting old, but it's better if other humans verify things. You would want to add emailing the press or other interested parties, but that's not hard.

However, another problem is the web hosting company has the real data, and you don't want anybody to have it until you release it. That's why you need a divided key. You could have several web hosts and divide the key up among them, and have them send it on d-day to the host that has the encrypted data.

However, there is a lot to be said for plans that use existing infrastructure. However, with most of those plans, you can't demonstrate that you really did hide the data in a place it will get revealed, which is your best insurance policy. Ideally you want them to be sure you really did it, but not able to get at it, and for the holders not to be able to read it.

Unless I'm misunderstanding

lux — Sun, 07 May 2006 15:11:57 -0700

Unless I'm misunderstanding your challenge, this doesn't sound too hard to do. If your evidence can go onto the 'net, then all you need to do is set up a website that will take a page live on date/time X unless you log into the admin page and manually change the go-live date. IIRC, MovableType already has that kind of functionality out of the box, and even if they don't, it's a pretty trivial hack.

All you'd need is to set up and pay for a hosted website that isn't obviously tied to you. A bit more of a challenge, but if you could find a place that will allow you to pay cash for one of those preloaded Visa debit cards, then you could pay for the account without your actual name being attached it.

You're still vulnerable to being tortured into revealing the location/password, though.

Payment not enough

brad — Fri, 05 May 2006 01:38:52 -0700

Remember, unlike the traditional movie version, where the information is hidden in an unknown place, this modern computerized version actually provides proof that you have hidden the information to be revealed if you die. So unless the service confirms it is you when you pay, the bad guys could just pay for you.

Why not make the regular

Jnsaff — Wed, 03 May 2006 07:23:01 -0700

Why not make the regular payment as the notification that I'm still alive? If the escrow does not get the payment then the service is terminated and the information made public.

"Better hope nothing happens to me" service.

brad — Tue, 02 May 2006 00:03:15 -0700

Here’s an interesting problem. In the movies we always see scenes where the good guy is fighting the Evil Conspiracy (EvilCon) and he tells them he’s hidden the incriminating evidence with a friend who will release it to the papers if the good guy disappears under mysterious circumstances. Today EvilCon would just quickly mine your social networking platform to find all your friends and shake them down for the evidence.

So here’s the challenge. Design a system so that if you want to escrow some evidence, you can do it quickly, reliably and not too expensively, at a brief stop at an internet terminal while on the run from EvilCon. Assume EvilCon is extremely powerful, like the NSA. Here are some of the challenges:

You need to be able to pay those who do escrow, as this is risky work. At the same time there must be no way to trace the payment.
You don’t want the escrow agents to be able to read the data. Instead, you will split the encryption keys among several escrow agents in a way that some subset of them must declare you missing to assemble the key and publish the data.
You need some way to vet escrow agents to assure they will do their job faithfully, but at the same time you must assume some of them work for EvilCon if there is a large pool.
They must have some way to check if you are still alive. Regularly searching for you in Google or going to your web site regularly might be traced.

Some thoughts below…