You can prevent this by putting a note in some place that isn’t public but would be found later, such as a will, that says that any purported suicide note is fake unless it contains a particular password.
Unfortunately while this strategy might occasionally reveal a death to have been murder, it doesn’t really work as a deterrent; someone who thinks you’ve done this would make the death look like an accident or medical issue instead.
You can publish it, including the output of a standard hash function applied to the secret password. “Any real note will contain a preimage of this hash.”
Your effort must scale to be appropriate to the capabilities of the people trying to remove you from the system. You have to know if they’re the type of person who would immediately default to checking the will.
More understanding and calibration towards what modern assassination practice you should actually expect is mandatory because you’re dealing with people putting some amount of thinkoomph into making your life plans fail, so your cost of survival is determined by what you expect your attack surface looks like. The appropriate-cost and the cost-you-decided-to-pay vary in OOMs depending on the circumstances, particularly the intelligence, resources, and fixations of the attacker. For example, the fact that this happened 2 weeks after assassination got all over the news is a fact that you don’t have the privilege of ignoring if you want the answer, even though that particular fact will probably turn out to be unhelpful e.g. because the whole thing was probably just a suicide due to the base rates of disease and accidents and suicide being so god damn high.
If this sounds wasteful, it is. It’s why our civilization has largely moved past assassination, even though getting-people-out-of-the-way is so instrumentally convergent for humans. We could end up in a cycle where assassination gets popular again after people start excessively standing in each other’s way (knowing they won’t be killed for it), or a stable cultural state like the Dune books or the John Wick universe and we’ve just been living in a long trough where elites aren’t physically forced to live their entire lives like mob bosses playing chess games against invisible adversaries.
Yes, they do. People also amuse themselves from beyond the grave by arranging for their deaths to look like murders before killing themselves. Or are so overcome by remorse at fabricating lies about their beloved friends to the feds that they encase their feet in concrete and throw themselves into nearby lakes without thinking about how it’d look. Or forget their secret passwords to authenticate their suicide notes and decide it’s too much trouble to retrieve it.
So sure, I agree there are reasons why a death that strongly looks like murder might still be suicide. But that doesn’t address my position that if you can broadcast the message that you have no intention to kill yourself in the clear with perfect authentication, and still not be sufficiently convincing that your imminent death isn’t suicide, elaborate schemes with passwords or cryptographic hashes don’t do anything.
You can prevent this by putting a note in some place that isn’t public but would be found later, such as a will, that says that any purported suicide note is fake unless it contains a particular password.
Unfortunately while this strategy might occasionally reveal a death to have been murder, it doesn’t really work as a deterrent; someone who thinks you’ve done this would make the death look like an accident or medical issue instead.
You can publish it, including the output of a standard hash function applied to the secret password. “Any real note will contain a preimage of this hash.”
Your effort must scale to be appropriate to the capabilities of the people trying to remove you from the system. You have to know if they’re the type of person who would immediately default to checking the will.
More understanding and calibration towards what modern assassination practice you should actually expect is mandatory because you’re dealing with people putting some amount of thinkoomph into making your life plans fail, so your cost of survival is determined by what you expect your attack surface looks like. The appropriate-cost and the cost-you-decided-to-pay vary in OOMs depending on the circumstances, particularly the intelligence, resources, and fixations of the attacker. For example, the fact that this happened 2 weeks after assassination got all over the news is a fact that you don’t have the privilege of ignoring if you want the answer, even though that particular fact will probably turn out to be unhelpful e.g. because the whole thing was probably just a suicide due to the base rates of disease and accidents and suicide being so god damn high.
If this sounds wasteful, it is. It’s why our civilization has largely moved past assassination, even though getting-people-out-of-the-way is so instrumentally convergent for humans. We could end up in a cycle where assassination gets popular again after people start excessively standing in each other’s way (knowing they won’t be killed for it), or a stable cultural state like the Dune books or the John Wick universe and we’ve just been living in a long trough where elites aren’t physically forced to live their entire lives like mob bosses playing chess games against invisible adversaries.
How is this better than stating explicitly that you’re not going to commit suicide?
People change their minds a lot.
Yes, they do. People also amuse themselves from beyond the grave by arranging for their deaths to look like murders before killing themselves. Or are so overcome by remorse at fabricating lies about their beloved friends to the feds that they encase their feet in concrete and throw themselves into nearby lakes without thinking about how it’d look. Or forget their secret passwords to authenticate their suicide notes and decide it’s too much trouble to retrieve it.
So sure, I agree there are reasons why a death that strongly looks like murder might still be suicide. But that doesn’t address my position that if you can broadcast the message that you have no intention to kill yourself in the clear with perfect authentication, and still not be sufficiently convincing that your imminent death isn’t suicide, elaborate schemes with passwords or cryptographic hashes don’t do anything.
Really they do those things? The concrete?
I think it’s on a spectrum of likelihood and therefore believability.
I wasn’t commenting on your message, just what you’d said in that comment. Sure it’s better to say it than not. And better yet to do more.