© REUTERS/ GLENN GREENWALD/LAURA POITRAS/COURTESY OF THE GUARDIAN
On
Friday night, famed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted out a 64
character code before quickly deleting the message along with a
mysterious warning earlier this week that “It’s Time” which had called
on colleagues of the former contractor to contact him leaving the
internet to speculate that the characters could be an encryption key
for a major document leak, it may be a “dead man’s switch” set to go
in effect if the whistleblower were killed or captured, or potentially
both.
A
dead man’s switch is a message set up to be automatically sent if the
holder of an account does not perform a regular check-in. The
whistleblower has acknowledged that he has distributed encrypted files
to journalists and associates that have not yet been released so
in Snowden’s case, the dead man’s switch could be an encryption key
for those files.
As
of this time, Edward Snowden’s Twitter account has gone silent for over
24 hours which is far from unprecedented for the whistleblower but is
curious at a time when public concern has been raised over his
well-being. The 64 hex characters in the code do appear to rule out the
initial theory that Edward Snowden, like so many of us, simply butt
dialed his phone, but instead is a clearly a secure hash algorithm that
can serve as a signature for a data file or as a password.
The timing shortly after the "It’s Time" tweet also have caused concern for some
Reddit theorists such
as a user named stordoff who believes that the nascent Twitter post
"was intended to set something in motion." The user postulates that it
is an encrypted message, a signal, or a password.
Snowden’s
initial data release in 2013 exposed what many had feared about the NSA
for years, that the agency had gone rogue and undertaken a massive
scheme of domestic surveillance. However, it is also known that the
information released was only part of the document cache he had acquired
from government servers.
© REUTERS/ SVEIN OVE EKORNESVAAG/NTB SCANPIX
It
has been reported that additional government data was distributed
in encrypted files to trusted journalists who were told to not release
the information unless they received a signal urging them to –
information that the whistleblower determined was too sensitive
for release at the time.
The
possibility also exists that Snowden has decided that after three years
in hiding that additional information needed to be released to the
public independent of some physical harm to himself, but the
whistleblower’s fans and privacy advocates across the world will
continue to sit on the edge of their seats in worry until and unless he
tweets to confirm that he is safe.
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