I interpret this as it's protected in such a way that any information he can give is not sufficient to access the documents.

(copy pasted from my reply on another comment below)

Agreed. The specificity of his claim seems to support that, as well:

>I cannot be coerced...

vs. "won't", "would never", et. al.

How would that work though? Wouldn't it mean that in order to access the info he is talking about, you need something more than knowledge he has in his head - like physical access to something?

But then, in the worst case scenario - how could Snowden access it himself if he needs the documents?

A very simple way to achieve something like this is to generate a random password, print it out and give half to someone else. Then you need 2 people to access the file.

Then better, he gives two halves to at least 4 people (2 copies of each half, to prevent "denial of opening" if one person is blocked) he keeps nothing. He personally doesn't need the data. Publicly interesting things are by journalists. The "don't try to kill me" data is at best when not by him at all.

I posit there's nothing earth shaking on his own notebooks anymore.

I think that as well. If I knew I were going to go on the run and be in custody in unknown countries, I wouldn't want to be traveling with anything secret on my person. Get the data all distributed however you want before you go, and just have your laptop for communication. The press always says he has 4 government laptops. Why would you want to carry them around?

If I remember, nobody authoritatively claimed that he took anything else physical but copied the secret data to the USB stick. If he had to use a stick then there were never notebooks with secret data that he could take.

Some article somewhere mentioned that he carries 4 notebooks, and then the press started fear mongering and compromiting him by insinuating that the notebooks are full of secrets and government property. Can anybody quote an official claim that the notebooks aren't his own?

Perhaps there are scenarios I am not thinking of then but then in order to access the documents/information, he would need to be able to freely communicate with the other party. If he was to be detained somewhere without outside contact the world, then how can the info be disseminated to fulfill his threat?

A verbal agreement akin to a killswitch. No verifiable contact by august 5th? Info dump to pastebin. Resets every two weeks.

Similar suggestion to what's proposed here:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/laptop_securit...

It doesn't then take much torture to extract the other person's name. Then a little more torture for the other party to get the missing piece of the puzzle.

Why would he know their name? Why wouldn't they have a similar group of people-switches arranged in a hierarchy?

This is my belief.

Spread the password and access details to two people without keeping it yourself. Those two people split their in half without keeping it themselves. The four people who now have the password are the 'kill switch' required to monitor Snowden's location. Snowden has no idea who they are.

Should he be tortured, all he can do is reveal his first two contacts. The torturer will now have to abduct those two people to get the key.

All these second level people know is the two people THEY spoke to. So you need BOTH of the second level to get all four of the third level people.

And then you'll have to abduct another FOUR people to get the key. All before these four people realize Snoden has disappeared.

He knows he can't resist torture. But he doesn't have to. He LITERALLY cannot be coerced.

If those people are in different countries (e.g. one in the U.S. and one in China) then it is not possible to get them.

Especially not if he also has a killswitch which will go off once he disappears. The question is if said killswitch exists will it release the data or destroy it?

Perhaps it's more of a way to destroy data than to not reveal it, like maybe some sort of dead-man's switch. If he doesn't maintain some routine, then perhaps some data or documents gets automatically destroyed.

But then... why wouldn't he say that more precisely?

If I had my documents encrypted with keys that I'd distributed to multiple parties, I'd be shouting it from the rooftops: "No point torturing me, the key is in three pieces and if I don't sign in every week the data will be destroyed so realistically you can't possibly seize all the pieces in the time-frame you'd require! Of course, if you can get all the pieces, just stick us all together in the same room and I promise to give you my piece, so no point torturing me then either."

Seems like there'd be a really strong incentive to have people know you had a mechanism that ensured it.

Maybe his information is encrypted such that it requires multiple parties to decrypt; i.e. his consent is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to decrypt his data, so that it wouldn't be revealed even under torture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing

I think he may be hinting that he does not hold the key to the information, perhaps multiple keys are required, or the nature of the key is such that it cannot be reproduced under duress, etc etc.

He is probably using some encryption technique which requires multiple keys to unlock, perhaps similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing

I think he probably means he has a distress password that will destroy his encrypted data if he was put under duress to disclose anything. I don't believe he is saying he can withstand pain indefinitely.

Seems like anyone with a clue would have made a raw copy of the data before applying the password. Assuming the raw media is physically accessible to them, that is. Hmmm....

Such training does not exist anywhere on this planet.

Edit:

I already mentioned SERE training in a higher level post. It's pretty intense, but still, the most valuable lesson you learn is that everyone will end up talking.

I was simply commenting on the possibility of a person resisting torture. If that person has some sort of safety mechanism in place, the torturer might not be able to get the information he wants, but that's not because the victim has resisted, because he won't.

Many US military personnel go through SERE[1] training, which includes some rather unpleasant things, and other countries have similar programs (The UK RTI[2] for one example).

Obviously a group less concerned about the long-term health of their interrogatees have a lot more flexibility in methods, and training is largely understood to be a delaying tactic to spoil time-sentitive tactical data, rather than resist interrogation indefinitely.

Hypothetically, there could be a mechanism by which he has to check in with some associates periodically, who by means of some N of M secret sharing are able to destroy/release the data otherwise. Then you need to resist for only 1-2 checkin periods. Or have a duress codeword that causes the same result. Any destruction scheme requires that the data be held somewhere secure enough not to be cloned though.

(And any heartbeat type scheme requires periodic communication with some/all associates, possibly leading your adversary to them, although broadcast media is probably good enough while he's mainstream news)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival,_Evasion,_Resistance_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistance_to_interrogation

This was an interesting read: http://www.quora.com/Torture/Whats-the-best-thing-to-do-if-b...

> You'll break. Instantly. So spare yourself the agony. Just spill the beans.

The training is right here:

1) Write some software that destroys your data if you don't login every x hours.

2) Under duress, stall for x hours.

If they abduct and torture you immediately, the chances of you stalling for x hours is pretty much non-existent. Snowden is in Russia. Arguably, no nation on the planet is better at torturing people than they are, and unlike the U.S. Russia doesn't really give a shit if the rest of the world doesn't like their methods. His interrogation would likely take minutes, not hours.

Well, my point is that there are alternate ways of ensuring the data doesn't get out, not just by being really good at resisting torture.

Other methods:

A) Alternate password that destroys the data.

B) Cyanide capsule in tooth.

You can make a process where you breaking down and cooperating with the enemy is not enough to reveal the info.

Snowden is FULL of crap.

Could you explain why?

Due to the specificity of his claims. Also he was probably very reasonably paranoid during the prep phase of this whole fiasco. Coercion is not an unreasonable expectation for someone in his position and he has the technical chops to implement such a failsafe. I cannot imagine that anyone in his situation with a modicum of technical savvy would simply carry around data that one could be forced to decrypt.

I wouldn't hold your breath. sigzero is not a fan of Snowden, as can be deduced from his other posts on this subject.