Suppose that you are a whistleblower, and you suspect what someone will try to “suicide” you. How can you protect yourself?
If someone wants to murder you, they can. If you ever walk outside, you can’t avoid being shot by a sniper. Or a random thug will be paid by a mysterious stranger to stab you. So my question is not “how can you make yourself immortal”, but rather “how can you make it so that if you are killed, it will very obviously not be a suicide”.
Saying “I have no intention to kill myself, and I suspect that I might be murdered” is not enough.
Wearing a camera that is streaming to a cloud 24⁄7, and your friends can publish the video in case of your death… seems a bit too much. (Also, it wouldn’t protect you e.g. against being poisoned. But I think this is not a typical way how whistleblowers die.) Is there something simpler?
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.
If someone wants to murder you, they can. If you ever walk outside, you can’t avoid being shot by a sniper.
If the person or people trying to murder you is omnicompetent, then it’s hard. If they’re regular people, then there are at least lots of temporary measures you can take that would make it more difficult. You can fly to a random state or country and check into a motel without telling anybody where you are. Or you could find a bunch of friends and stay in a basement somewhere. Mobsters used to call doing that sort of thing for a time before a threat had receded “going to ground”.
Wearing a camera that is streaming to a cloud 24⁄7, and your friends can publish the video in case of your death… seems a bit too much. (Also, it wouldn’t protect you e.g. against being poisoned. But I think this is not a typical way how whistleblowers die.) Is there something simpler?
You could move to New York or London, and your every move outside of a private home or apartment will already be recorded. Then place a security camera in your house.
I will lower the possible incentive of the killers by publishing all I know—and make it in such legal way that it can be used in court even if I am dead (affidavit?)
Saying “I have no intention to kill myself, and I suspect that I might be murdered” is not enough.
Frankly I do think this would work in many jurisdictions. It didn’t work for John McAfee because he has a history of crazy remarks, it sounds like the sort of thing he’d do to save face/generate intrigue if he actually did plan on killing himself, and McAfee made no specific accusations. But if you really thought Sam Altman’s head of security was going to murder you, you’d probably change their personal risk calculus dramatically by saying that repeatedly on the internet. Just make sure you also contact police specifically with what you know, so that the threat is legible to them as an institution.
Suppose that you are a whistleblower, and you suspect what someone will try to “suicide” you. How can you protect yourself?
If someone wants to murder you, they can. If you ever walk outside, you can’t avoid being shot by a sniper. Or a random thug will be paid by a mysterious stranger to stab you. So my question is not “how can you make yourself immortal”, but rather “how can you make it so that if you are killed, it will very obviously not be a suicide”.
Saying “I have no intention to kill myself, and I suspect that I might be murdered” is not enough.
Wearing a camera that is streaming to a cloud 24⁄7, and your friends can publish the video in case of your death… seems a bit too much. (Also, it wouldn’t protect you e.g. against being poisoned. But I think this is not a typical way how whistleblowers die.) Is there something simpler?
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.
If the person or people trying to murder you is omnicompetent, then it’s hard. If they’re regular people, then there are at least lots of temporary measures you can take that would make it more difficult. You can fly to a random state or country and check into a motel without telling anybody where you are. Or you could find a bunch of friends and stay in a basement somewhere. Mobsters used to call doing that sort of thing for a time before a threat had receded “going to ground”.
You could move to New York or London, and your every move outside of a private home or apartment will already be recorded. Then place a security camera in your house.
I will lower the possible incentive of the killers by publishing all I know—and make it in such legal way that it can be used in court even if I am dead (affidavit?)
Frankly I do think this would work in many jurisdictions. It didn’t work for John McAfee because he has a history of crazy remarks, it sounds like the sort of thing he’d do to save face/generate intrigue if he actually did plan on killing himself, and McAfee made no specific accusations. But if you really thought Sam Altman’s head of security was going to murder you, you’d probably change their personal risk calculus dramatically by saying that repeatedly on the internet. Just make sure you also contact police specifically with what you know, so that the threat is legible to them as an institution.
I may be an outlier here. But if I thought I was going to be assassinated, I would think of:
JFK -MLK
James A. Garfield
Lincoln
Franz Ferdinand
And from these I’d think “Hu, better buy a bullet proof vest”.
I would unfortunately not think about ‘Being Suicided’, unless I had an expectation that it would occur in this way.
One way of not being suicide is not live alone. Stay with 4 friends.