Edward Snowden Declares Himself Torture-Proof

[Cronus Protagonist]

61. I think a lot of people are making uneducated assumptions here

If he has no knowledge and therefore no memory of the keys used to encrypt the information, torture cannot succeed if the intent is to gain access to encrypted information and not just to punish him (like it was used by the US in Abu Graib).

It seems to me that most people here appear to be under the assumption that he has something stored in his mind that would be worth torturing him for, when clearly he is indicating otherwise. You could drug him until he acts like a baboon but if the information isn't there, it won't work.

He knew when he started this that torture might be applied, so he likely built his encryption around super long public/private digital keys and gave some of the files to some people, some keys to others and some matching keys to another trusted party.

Of course, he cannot remember the keys contents, they being long and cryptic themselves, but he can have stuff unlocked at his command by a third party who has one or more of the keys. If the keys were distributed well, he would be able to get each portion of his bounty unlocked upon request simply by asking one friend to send the key to another party who has the encrypted file.

So all they could get out of him is the names of the parties who have the files and the keys, and these parties could be scattered around the world and simply be known under their hacker names to him. He may not even know what country these people are in, never mind who they really are or their addresses.

So they could get some email addresses out of him. Then what? As soon as it became evident that they had tortured the information out of him, all parties might send their keys to certain locations which they already know, and which Snowden does not know. The whole thing gets unlocked and all data is dumped for public viewing. He has already indicated that he is assassination proof for that very reason. All this talk about him being a lowly idiot employee is propaganda, remember.

Anyway, in this scenario he's torture proof because if they torture him and try to act upon anything they uncover, they might trigger the total act of clarity, which is surely something the people doing the torturing won't want to happen, ergo, they won't torture him. Or kill him.

He knows nothing worth torturing for and killing him would release all his info at once. I don't doubt it for one minute.