Hey comrades. So I have started keeping a private journal to track and articulate my disjointed thoughts about the organising and groups I'm involved with. It's a directory of encrypted text files (currently just using vimcrypt but I could easily switch to something else) on a LUKS drive.
Obviously, it would be quite bad—both for my safety and the integrity of the groups the notes may concern—for the notes to get breached right now. However, I do think it would be valuable for revolutionaries in the future to be able to read the thoughts of someone who was involved in struggles potentially long past—it'd become a part of history, and perhaps could be used to help future communists improve upon the organising of the past.
I would want these notes to only be released after my death, so that there is no risk of incriminating me, and also only after they become irrelevant in the sense of the groups/events they concern are long past. The typical way to do this is a dead man's switch where you keep pressing some button every e.g. week, and if it doesn't get pressed for a week, your server publishes your secret documents.
The first problem with that setup is that relies on either the data being unencrypted, or I store the decryption keys on the server being used to store the encrypted data, which seems to defeat the purpose of the data being encrypted imo. I guess I could store the decryption keys separately and that also be subject to a dead man's switch but I'm just wary about the security implications of storing it at all, given the fact that I would have to use someone else's servers if I want it to be released a long time after my death rather than e.g. a week afterwards, when my own VPS may still be running.
The second problem is that digital dead man's switches assume that the individual in question isn't going to go to prison lol. It's almost certain I'll go to prison again at some point before I die (have already been locked up a few times in my short life), and it would be quite bad to have a bunch of potentially incriminating secret notes be released when I go to prison! I'm a lot more likely to be imprisoned alive than I am to die. I've thought of some ways to get around this—I could let a trusted person know about the switch and have them press it for me if I go to prison. Or, upon triggering the dead man's switch, instead of publishing things, it privately sends things to a trusted person, and that person is instructed to publish it if I'm dead and to discard it if I'm not. The prior problem about encryption still stands though.
As previously hinted at, I would want a significant delay between my death and the publishing of my notes, to minimise the risk to any groups or comrades implicated by the notes. So I think I would also have to store this on some big company or, maybe, a big non-profit organisation, that is reliable and unlikely to go down in X years, where X is however long I want to wait before things get released. So that brings further concerns about security if I have to entrust anything with a big tech company (and why would they host content by a dead person? They'd probably want to delete it to reclaim storage space; not like I'm paying them any money if I'm dead).
Given the first and third problems especially, I'm starting to think this isn't possible to do?
It's not the end of the world if I can't figure out a way to publish my notes. I don't mean to overblow my own importance in the struggle—I don't think these notes will be decisive or anything. But I think it would be nice to make them available—it would be nice if they could contribute something to the world, I guess, instead of just being me trying to sort my own thoughts about things I'm doing or experiencing. But obviously protecting the movement and my comrades comes first, and if I can't set something up that doesn't put them at risk, I won't bother.
Would appreciate people's thoughts. And perhaps if we figure something out, this might inspire other people to do similarly.
Edit: There's nothing in this post of use to my domestic police that they don't already know lol, chill. And I explicitly said that I don't intend to do anything unless I figure out a way to do it without endangering any of my comrades.
I'd suggest either A: not worrying about it, lots of things get lost to time, place the security and safety of your comrades over some people in the future who will find it an object of curiosity and interest but not of help as the revolution will have already won.
Or B: since you want it published long after your death after a point where it no longer compromises op-sec for others I think you need to consider real world solutions. Storing copies with a trusted friend in an encrypted form and giving another very trusted friend the encryption key.
Put both in sealed envelopes on durable storage media for the encrypted notes themselves (a MABL type HTL bluray (possibly two copies on two discs) would be probably my top choice as flash drives and the like often fail or suffer decay and corruption in short periods of time but the alternative would be several copies on several different media or at least multiple of the same) and include instructions for who the other person is to get in contact with ONLY upon your death and to only combine the two and for the person with the decryption info to only release this password to the other if you are dead and the year is at least 20xx or x number of years have passed, whatever. I would also include both on the storage medium with the notes and a paper printed hard copy details about the encryption and what software should be used to decrypt it in case say this is being accessed in 15-20 years it may not be obvious. I would if possible include the executable software and all necessary components for accessing the files on the storage medium itself in case in the future it isn't easily available. You could break up your encryption key among more than just one person so have 3 or more people involved but the problem then becomes what if one of them dies and their stuff is thrown out? There are schemes for breaking authentication data into multiple pieces of which only a certain percentage are required for recovery though I can't recall them at the moment the privacy community people may know what I'm talking about but you'd still need like 4 or more trustworthy people for redundancy not counting the person or persons holding the data (and you may want to consider having two people holding copies in case again one dies). Also for the data itself I'd make sure to include with it a paper that explains what it is or gives some hint is important and who it should be given to if the person in question dies (another close friend) especially if only one copy is being made instead of two copies for two friends.
You could alter this arrangement a bit. You could break a key/password in half, give copies of the same half to several people you trust with instructions and if you're short on people copies of the data as well and then arrange for the other half to be delivered by some means far in the future. Of course that becomes a problem itself as there's no way to know that Google won't delete your gmail account with half the password while you're say in prison or whatever.
You need to evaluate risk of each part of the chain for both security (how few actors it requires to compromise it and how trustworthy x number of actors are) and preservation/longevity as in how will this arrangement function if people die, how immune is it to stuff being thrown out or to the media itself decaying (hence media redundancy and MABL HTL bluray discs which should last several centuries being preferable as most flash drives, SSDs, hard drives will see data decay or corrupted within anywhere from a year sitting unused to perhaps 10 years and it's all a matter of luck).
If you do it like 2 people, one holding the digital copies encrypted, one holding the whole key then collusion between both is needed to get at your data (consideration to coercion by legal means should be given and how well these people will hide this stuff or go to bat to protect it), on the other hand either dying or losing the key or the data means a total loss of it so it's not very strong for preservation purposes. Two people with one holding the data, one holding a partial key, and some electronic mechanism of delivering the other half of the key means an adversary has to get at both those people and the system holding it which also means those two cannot collude on their own against you or be pressured into doing so but introduces another potential area of failure (3 versus only 2 for the previous idea where any one failing means total loss). So redundancy is key. I'd try if possible to have two automated dead-man switches from two companies/services that don't give away the whole thing which send email, snail-mail, etc to a person holding a copy of the data so you have redundancy. Otherwise I'd try to have the dead-man switch located within a service you can pre-pay for many years into the future. If you can only pay for 10 years, you could include if you trust your friends an instruction not to use it for an additional x number of years in your dead-man message. Or you could avoid this automation, and do say 4 trusted people, with 2 getting copies of the data and 2 getting the decryption information and the identities of the people with the data. But you must assess and plan for risks. Would adversaries break into the homes of these people with the decryption info and find it then break into the homes with the copies of the data and find it and then decrypt it? Could you use nick-names that are used off-line and not known to facebook and the like to describe who the people with the data are without naming them directly or so on.
Ultimately it's likely you'll have to make some compromises in survivability of the data or security unless you have a decent amount of trustworthy friends.