You could make this into a bidding war. The dead man's switch owner makes a base payment to install the switch. An adversary can block the switch by paying double that, the owner can overrule the adversary by paying double of his bid, the adversary can override the override by quadrupling his bid, etc etc.
To make it more "interesting", implement it as a smart contract on the blockchain, so an adversary can also choose to exploit software vulnerabilities for profit...
I'm sure there is some VC money in this.