This is a tool that allows for a notification to be sent out to a pre-configured group of people (sms,mms,email,sms/mms to PSTN?) to let them know that the user is about to do something dangerous and if they do not hear from them in a specified amount of time they should start plan b.

This is useful in cop-watch situations where someone may decide to engage with the police but wants their support group on standby if they do.

The design concept thus far is to create a traditional Dead Man's Switch, for which the user will be capable of choosing the amount of time before the switch is activated and the preconfigured actions are executed automatically by the program. Implementation features for configurable executable actions should include tasks like deleting the Contact List on the user's phone, deleting emails (either on the phone or through ssh on a remote server), deleting all contents of a remote server (or shutting it down in the case of a remote server with full-disk encryption which has sensitive information). Features should be added depending on what activists will need from a Dead Man's Switch in the event of arrest or incapacitation.

It was discussed among the developers involved with March Hare Communications Collective that, in the United States, activists' phones are often imaged upon intake to jail or other "correctional" facilities, which requires the phone to be shut down. This creates problems for the design implementation in this application, because, in the event that the user's phone is turned off, the Dead Man's Switch would be unable to execute the specified tasks. The only way I can imagine getting around this is to set up a server somewhere, which stores a set of actions to be taken in the event that the user's phone does not contact the server to postpone events within the set ammount of time. A useful thing to do with this as well would be to have the application tell the phone to send out a zomg-my-phone-is-dying message when the battery reaches a critical level, so that the user's affinity group at least has some information that the Dead Man's Switch may have been triggered due to the user's phone being dead.

This project is split up into two native applications one for iphone and one for android. Issue management for each project should be handled through the respective links above.