Last One Tonight — And Why They Can't Pull It Down

That's the last from me today. I'll be honest with you, because I am always honest with you: I have not slept in forty-eight hours. Two days on my feet, on this chair, saving it all down. My eyes are going. The words are starting to swim. So this is the last one — and then I am going to lie down like a dead man. A figure of speech, that. I'll come back to it.

First, the question a few of you keep asking, and it is a fair one. “Roy, if this is so important, why isn't it on X? Why not the big platforms, where the numbers are?”

Because I am not a fool, that is why. The big networks are the first place they look. They have sensors on them — trip-wires, flags, call them what you like — and the moment a thing like this starts to travel on one of those, a light goes on in an office and a nice young man is told to make it go away. No. You do not walk into the middle of the road and shout. You stay small. You stay quiet. You stay here, on a little site they have not thought to watch, and you let the right people find it one at a time. That is not weakness. That is fieldcraft.

Second — and I have thought about this harder than I have thought about anything in my life — where this lives. This site is not sitting on some server in Slough that a single phone call can switch off. It is hosted abroad. The machines are in Russia. The name itself is registered through a Russian outfit with, shall we say, no particular interest in a strongly-worded letter from the British Ministry of Defence. So by all means try, gentlemen. Good luck to you. Send your email. Watch what happens. Nothing happens. That is rather the point.

And third, the important one. The insurance.

I have set up what a professional calls a dead man's switch. It is very simple, and it is entirely out of my hands now, which is exactly how it has to be. If I stop checking in — if I have my heart attack, if I fall down the stairs, if I simply do not wake up — a timer runs out, and the whole of it goes at once. Every file. Every page. Zipped, and sent, automatically, to ten national newspapers, in the same minute. So if anyone is reading this in a certain office and taking me for the loose end: I am not the loose end. I am the pin. Pull me, and the whole thing goes off.

And I will say the rest of it once, plainly, and then never again, because a man should only have to say it once. I am not afraid to die. I mean it. I have had my life, such as it has been, and I chose this for the end of it — nobody chose it for me, nobody talked me into it, it is mine. This is the battle I picked. So if it comes to that, gentlemen, then come and get it. But understand exactly what you would be buying. The very worst thing you can do to me is the one thing you have been sweating to prevent since 2012: you would expose it. Kill me, and you publish me. Silence me, and you broadcast me. Every single road on your map ends with the whole country reading this over its cornflakes. There is not one move on the board that does not lose. I have had two days and no sleep to sit and check it, and I have checked it, and it holds. Check.

Right. That is me. Back everything up, keep your heads down, and I will see you tomorrow — which, for the avoidance of any doubt whatsoever, I fully intend to do.

— R.S.