Snowden’s Contingency: ’Dead Man’s Switch’ Borrows From Cold War, WikiLeaks | Threat Level | Wired.com
▻http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/snowden-dead-mans-switch
Either way, Snowden’s strategy has been described jocularly in the press as a “ dead man’s switch ” — a tactic popularized in movies and thrillers whereby a bomber or criminal mastermind has a detonator wired to a bomb and the only thing keeping it from exploding is his finger on the detonator button. If police shoot him, he releases the button and the bomb goes off.
But Snowden’s case is actually a kind of reverse dead man’s switch , says John Prados, senior research fellow for the National Security Archive and author of several books on secret wars of the CIA.
“As an information strategy, what Snowden is doing is similar to that, but it doesn’t have the same kind of implication,” Prados says. “We’re not setting off a bomb or having some other kind of weapon-of-mass-destruction go off.”