Suppose the suspect Alice only has a portion of the key. Someone else (Bob...) has the remaining key bits.
Alice is busted, and 'compelled to give the key', and DOES provide her portion of the key.
Bob is never found.
Then Alice would be indefinitely imprisoned, even if she would have actually complied with the court order.
It seems unethical, to me.
Bonus question: Alice pretends that Bob exists, but actually he does not, but police cannot prove that. What then?
A possible answer to the first question: Alice is not compelled to provide the key. She is compelled to decrypt the drive. Obviously she can't do that without Bob. Alice is screwed and will spend the rest of her life in prison.
> A possible answer to the first question: Alice is not compelled to provide the key. She is compelled to decrypt the drive. Obviously she can't do that without Bob. Alice is screwed and will spend the rest of her life in prison.
Yes, and in this scenario she would not be held in contempt, so your hypothetical does not apply.
You can only be held in contempt for refusing to comply with court orders, not for the failure of a desired outcome.
Let's put it another way: you are totally misunderstanding why this fellow is in jail. It is not because the hard drive remains encrypted - it is because he defied a court order to decrypt it. Granted, if the drive were decrypted by other means he would likely be let out of prison because the point of holding him for contempt would be frustrated - but that does not mean that he was put into jail because the drive was not decrypted. Contempt is solely about defying court orders.
If Alice gave over her half of the key, she would have complied with the order, therefore, there would be no grounds for contempt.
I co-authored a project that works on Debian that do unattended reboots of encrypted disk drives which allows for scenarios where Alice don't know any part of the key. Every time the machine boots up bob get a request on the network and he can chose to approve or deny. Bob in turn could be in a different country which would make coercion a bit hard.
>Alice pretends that Bob exists, but actually he does not, but police cannot prove that. What then?
Well it's pretty obvious what happens then. The police claim Alice is lying and hold her in contempt indefinitely. The man from the article claims that he doesn't remember the passwords anymore and can't possibly comply, he's still being held in contempt even though there's nothing concrete to show that he still knows the password.
Doesn't this boil down to the "I am willing but unable" situation? The man in this case was the "unwilling but able" situation. My question is wouldn't the man be shifted into the former situation if he just claimed to be now willing but to have forgotten his keys.
Alice has created a file containing random data. Authorities think it is an encrypted volume and wants Alice to give up the key. Alice has no way to prove it is just a file with random data and is imprisoned indefinitely for essentially having a file with random data =]
Not sure what the man's crime is here. Does he even remember his keys after sixteen months in the slammer? I don't even remember my Gmail password after 16 days of vacation. Basically, like the article says, it like not opening a safe for an inquisitor: you are damned if you do, you are damned if you don't. Encryption is nothing new people, you are just putting your data in a safe.
We have a tendency to misconstrue, willfully misinterpret, or altogether ignore the law when it comes to prosecuting individuals who we believe to be standing on much lower moral ground. We do so because we want so badly to punish the accused that we are willing to reduce or eliminate greater good that some privacy laws are aiming to provide (i.e. Trumps silly travel ban which is based on his hatred of Muslims built upon imaginary news stories and personal exaggerations of particular recent events -- all laws out the window)
> Encryption is nothing new people, you are just putting your data in a safe.
Well, you could also be held indefinitely for refusing to provide the combination for a safe. If there were safes that could keep them out indefinitely, anyway.
I suspect that they nailed him using ICAC's Black Ice app. It's a hacked version of the Freenet client that logs peer IPs, and tracks hashes that they handle. So his mistake was assuming that deniability was adequate, and failing to hit Freenet via Tor.
His crime is disobeying a court order, which is a crime that you can go to jail for. Just like if you had the key to a safe, and the court orders you to open the safe, you would go to jail if you refuse to do so. If he forgot the keys he could have told the court that and the court would evaluate his credibility.
*edited changed from key to combination because combination locks are protected by the 5th amendment and keys are not.
> Encryption is nothing new people, you are just putting your data in a safe.
I know this is an old argument, but what if I put the contents in a paper shredder, in the safe? It's still the data, it's just that it went through the shredder. Why is ok for the government to compel you to change the state of the data from encrypted to unencrypted? They couldn't compel Apple write software to decrypt a phone. Why can they compel me to write an encryption key to decrypt data.
Discloser all of my data is encrypted, and if the government asked I would really be torn about giving them keys.
He didn't commit a crime. He is being held in jail for contempt of court. This is how the system works. This is no different than if a judge demanded that you turn over any other form of evidence - it should not be so shocking that you can be held in contempt for refusing to obey a court order.
It is bad, however, that he is being let to rot indefinitely. That is the problem here - not that he was jailed for contempt in the first place.
The difference is that the authorities can crack open a safe without the suspect cooperating. But it's virtually impossible to decrypt something without the receiving the key.
I thought the U.S had better key disclosure law[1] than other countries? Personally I would rather not self-incriminate myself by revealing a key, no matter how draconian and lengthy the sentencing was. Why, you ask? Well I consider all my own personal data likened to an extension of my own mind, and revealing a key is like slicing a thin part of my brain and attempting to pick its contents. Never a gentlemanly thing to do in any circumstance.
In terms of being stopped and searched when traveling, I just carry a TailsOS bootable live USB. My laptop doesn't have a hard-drive and boots entirely from my TailsOS USB stick. I did not enable any persistent storage and any bookmarks I need to remember, I simply remember them by rote, like in that movie The Book of Eli[2]. My threat model is such that I don't want anybody knowing my business when traveling. The intrusiveness should only go so far as one question, like "Business or Pleasure?" and that's all.
From what I understand our legal system was designed to fail "open". Or rather that we are willing to let a guilty person go free rather than an innocent person go to jail.
I know everyone wants to have a perfect justice system but we have to ALSO decide which direction we would like it to fail until that time comes (never). In essence cases like this are more about this question. When the system fails, which direction do we want it to fail in?
Professor Orin Kerr has wrote about this exact case extensively, and provides a good insight into all legal aspects. I think it is well worth a read, especially the part about the 'forgone conclusion'.
Speaking from experience of 1 month vacation I'm not sure I'd be able to decrypt after 16 months of not touching a keyboard.
My most important passwords (passphrases for gpg used by password managers and luks) are in my head and muscle memory.
When I update passwords I tend to have them written down until I've typed them enough times.
So after a months vacation I often struggle to remember my work password for example. While using phrases makes all this easier these days, 16 months is a long time to presumably spend without your keyboard.
I like that metaphor. Encrypting data isn't so much like locking it in a safe as it is hiding it somewhere in the key space. The safe metaphor breaks down because you can drill a hole in the safe to see if there is anything inside. But you can't prove that some encrypted data exists any more than you can prove that a particular item is sitting around somewhere on Earth.
Seems to me the 5th should protect him. Question is, is that a good thing?
Should law enforcement have a right to search through court orders? In a world of unbreakable locks it seems very hard to get justice unless the law can do proper searches. If we end up in a world of unbreakable encryption everywhere, seems to me, criminal activity will have huge benefits. If we can't control crime, we can't have a just society. We can't protect a individuals rights if they are undermined by criminals. Of course, it's also hard if the state has too much power to protect and individuals rights. But somewhere we need pragmatic compromises.
If the only trace a criminal activity leaves is on a single encrypted drive, is it important if it gets prosecuted or not?
The police does parallel construction to avoid admitting access to illegally collected evidence, civil forfeiture to punish people for things police doesn't like without having to prove anything, etc — incentives for police to step over the rules are a larger problem than unbreakable encryption right now.
This is probably a lot less black and white then it might seem at first. If there is sufficient evidence, one can obtain a search warrant and this forces you to possibly act against your own best interest by allowing the police to search your home. On the other hand you can usually not be forced to testify against yourself.
So this becomes the question where decrypting a hard drive lies on this spectrum. Is it more like testifying against yourself or is it more like allowing the police to search your home? Assuming one agrees with the way testifying against yourself and searching your home is currently handled by the law.
> one can obtain a search warrant and this forces you to possibly act against your own best interest by allowing the police to search your home.
In Germany you never have to actively help the police even if they come with a warrant. They can't even compel you to open the door of the house or a physical safe. They will of course come in anyway and send you the bill for the locksmith, but it's your perfect right to just sit there and do nothing.
So with the hard disk encryption it's actually exactly the same: You don't have to help in any way, but of course the police can still take the drive and try to decrypt it. If they can't decrypt, well, bad luck. Not your problem, you don't have to help.
A search warrant does not really require the target to 'allow' the police to search; the target could choose not to cooperate and police would break into the home, for example. As far as I can see, it is lawful to the target to do this. Similarly, in Rawls's case, the government is free to attempt to bruteforce the passphrase without Rawls's cooperation.
Obviously the former. The home search is analoguous with handing the hard drive to the police (they're free to search it). Giving the key is analogous to voluntarily digging up a secret stash in your back yard. And I disagree with it not being black and white, if you didn't already notice that. Rights are rights.
I really hate to be writing this but it seems like the only solution...
Doesn't this whole situation and the threat thereof go away for 99.9% of the population if we decriminalize possession / "viewing" of child pornography? [Note: you could still be severely prosecuted for making it]
There doesn't appear to be anything else in the digital realm that can get you in such legal trouble. The only other thing I could think of is national defense espionage, or rogue WMD plans. And on these counts, 99.9% of people are going to be very difficult to put a plausible frame job for these crimes. Sure the 0.1% with security clearance could be framed here, but as far as I understand, that's a personal decision and risk each person go to make for themselves.
If you deny the prosecution the ability to use reasonable suspicion of CP to search, or compel a decryption of your digital files, it's going to be a long time before another case like this.
No, plenty of other stuff is illegal; just off the top of my head:
Possession of copy-righted material
Possession of hacking tools
Evidence of hacking
Data from corporate espionage
Accounting fraud
Fraud (e.g. fake credit info)
Evidence of other crimes (e.g. account books of drug deals)
Plans to commit other crimes
The list goes on. It just so happens the FBI is obsessed with CP, but if you decriminalize that, we'll have the same problems with other crimes.
I'm curious why he doesn't just claim that he forgot the key. There's no way to prove conclusively that he's lying, and a judge cannot jail someone for disobeying a court order that they have no way of obeying. If he's told them he knows it and just won't give it to them, then this bridge is probably burned, but it's probably his only shot. Absent a ruling from the Supreme Court on this issue, they can and will hold him until he complies, dies, or has already served the maximum possible sentence for the crimes he is suspected of committing.
Don't doubt that a judge can't or won't hold you indefinitely if they think you are lying. This guy was held for 14 years because the judge was convinced he was hiding assets in a civil case (divorce):
I mention this because there are parallels. In each case the man would say "I don't have the (key|money)" and in each case the judge can effectively sentence them to indefinite jail.
What happens if the drives develop bit rot over those 16 months preventing them from ever being decrypted? Based on the wording of what he is in contempt of, it sounds like he would sit in jail until death. To me, it sounds like the prosecution is trying to play a word game to get around 5th amendment protections.
As expected on HN I am not surprised to see people defending one's right to privacy and encryption. However, what's the solution then ? If all the "bad guys" who distribute illegal material do so encrypted volumes and refuse to give up the decryption key then what do we do ? It's a different world now; the police can't just take a drill out and open the safe.
They can hack his computer before nabbing him, grab tons of his data from connected providers, get a warrant to sneak in and plant one of several type of bugs that would allow them to aquire his pass phrase. Burst in while the machine is on and aquire the unlocked data or get the key from ram.
Failing that they can convict him based on other evidence or at least convince him that they can and cut a deal for access.
In the vital cases which are normally cited as examples of why we must allow cops to violate our right options abound.
What's left is petty crap and police incompetence which serve as poor justification for giving up our rights.
>As expected on HN I am not surprised to see people defending one's right to privacy and encryption. However, what's the solution then ? If all the "bad guys" who distribute illegal material do so encrypted volumes and refuse to give up the decryption key then what do we do ?
Why do we care for people distributing "illegal material" in the first place?
And how come this "illegal material" doesn't ever get decrypted? Catch them then.
Honestly, I fail to see how or why this should be a problem, considering that no actual injuries are inflicted in the storage or possession of ones and zeroes.
Sure, that's an obtuse abstraction, but honestly, the buck stops there. At the end of the day, they have a circuit encoded in a given state. Magnetic media that can be arbitrarily degaussed.
It's not real.
Stop prosecuting it.
So, okay, you wanna argue. Let's get more specific.
Bad things people can "have" encoded on their digital storage media:
1. stolen economic identifiers, such as credit
card numbers, and other mechanisms of fraud
2. raster graphics and audio depicting nudity,
or evidence of events that have since transpired,
and prove culpability, via direct participation
rather than simply the hoarding of collectible
media files of whatever persuasion
3. preferences and settings that can correlate
identity in other crimes, subscriber information
such IMEI numbers and MAC addresses, and more
4. classified information restricted from being
leaked among state actors or the general public
5. intellectual property that translates directly
to business opportunities, insider trading,
corporate espionage and other white collar
crimes
6. copyrighted music and movies, oh noes!
Listen. If it can fit onto a credit card sized device, it's already too late. So nothing is being stopped by this sort of search.
The demand for relinquishing data, in any such situation is not unlike demanding all the things that people write on napkins and envelopes. Every scrap of paper in someone's pocket. Movie tickets, dry cleaning stubs, match books, and so on. Evidence of a crime? Possibly. Is everyone guilty until proven innocent? Gee, I don't know. Maybe we should just make everyone empty their pockets, and take pictures, just in case.
The fact of that matter is that these are essentially fishing expeditions for item #3.
It's not about "illegal data" at all, nothing is ever going to divert ones and zeroes as contraband. That simply doesn't happen, and doesn't work. It's about coming up with reasons to harass people, as vectors into prosecuting other crimes. Smoking out the paranoid, so that they crack under the pressure of getting sweated down in the hot seat.
Just yesterday [0] someone (multiple people, actually) was claiming fingerprint locking on phones is unsafe based on fact the 5th amendment doesn't protect your fingerprints, but does protect your right to not reveal your password.
I have a related, seemingly analogous situation that I'm curious about.
If a suspect might have physically buried important evidence hundreds of miles of way in the middle of nowhere, such that it is effectively impossible to find, can the courts "compell" the suspect to give up any knowledge of this, in a similar fashion as the man in the article?
This is a good reason to have TrueCrypt hidden volumes and other forms of steganography. You can decrypt and still have more stuff that looks like random junk. No one can be sure you decrypted everything.
The best idea however is to have sensitive stuff stored encrypted on freenet, and log in using incognito browser sessions.
Modern encryption isn't that much difference in basic concept to a cipher, such that it takes data in readable form and makes it unreadable.
In Apple/Gov dispute on the San Bernardino iPhone case, Gov brought up the Burr case from 1807, arguing that a 3rd party could be compelled to decipher the contents, provided there was no self-incrimination (Apple argued Burr did not apply): http://www.macworld.com/article/3046095/legal/burrs-cipher-s...
Does anyone know if there has been an attempt to equate decryption to deciphering in US courts?
I'm assuming when they boot up (their copy of) the hard drive, it prompts for a passphrase, and if you type an incorrect one it'll tell that it's incorrect (as opposed to simply outputting garbage). That's the most common case anyway.
If that's the case, and it likely is, then that's pretty concrete proof that there IS something to decrypt.
edit: Actually, the article says that the hard drive was encrypt with Apple's FireVault, so there you go.
Here we have an example of a forceful, totalitarian state. Where they cannot keep up their laws due to technological progress, they threaten you with violence and boredom (boredom as in sitting in a cage as long as you refuse to comply). In communist era Eastern Europe, secret police used to send in beautiful prostitutes and/or agents to deal with people held in captivity. Get a man to erect his penis. When that happened, strong men stormed the room, grabbed the victim, and inserted a glass rod into his penis. Then smashed it. I would not like to go into details on what they did to women. You can look that up.
Land of the Free - as long as you do not encrypt your shit, that is
[+] [-] realo|9 years ago|reply
Suppose the suspect Alice only has a portion of the key. Someone else (Bob...) has the remaining key bits.
Alice is busted, and 'compelled to give the key', and DOES provide her portion of the key.
Bob is never found.
Then Alice would be indefinitely imprisoned, even if she would have actually complied with the court order.
It seems unethical, to me.
Bonus question: Alice pretends that Bob exists, but actually he does not, but police cannot prove that. What then?
A possible answer to the first question: Alice is not compelled to provide the key. She is compelled to decrypt the drive. Obviously she can't do that without Bob. Alice is screwed and will spend the rest of her life in prison.
Seems harsh.
[+] [-] libertymcateer|9 years ago|reply
Yes, and in this scenario she would not be held in contempt, so your hypothetical does not apply.
You can only be held in contempt for refusing to comply with court orders, not for the failure of a desired outcome.
Let's put it another way: you are totally misunderstanding why this fellow is in jail. It is not because the hard drive remains encrypted - it is because he defied a court order to decrypt it. Granted, if the drive were decrypted by other means he would likely be let out of prison because the point of holding him for contempt would be frustrated - but that does not mean that he was put into jail because the drive was not decrypted. Contempt is solely about defying court orders.
If Alice gave over her half of the key, she would have complied with the order, therefore, there would be no grounds for contempt.
[+] [-] belorn|9 years ago|reply
(Project called Mandos)
[+] [-] MertsA|9 years ago|reply
Well it's pretty obvious what happens then. The police claim Alice is lying and hold her in contempt indefinitely. The man from the article claims that he doesn't remember the passwords anymore and can't possibly comply, he's still being held in contempt even though there's nothing concrete to show that he still knows the password.
[+] [-] zik|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] externalreality|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saycheese|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attorney–client_privilege
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] amelius|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elcct|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] externalreality|9 years ago|reply
We have a tendency to misconstrue, willfully misinterpret, or altogether ignore the law when it comes to prosecuting individuals who we believe to be standing on much lower moral ground. We do so because we want so badly to punish the accused that we are willing to reduce or eliminate greater good that some privacy laws are aiming to provide (i.e. Trumps silly travel ban which is based on his hatred of Muslims built upon imaginary news stories and personal exaggerations of particular recent events -- all laws out the window)
[+] [-] mirimir|9 years ago|reply
> Encryption is nothing new people, you are just putting your data in a safe.
Well, you could also be held indefinitely for refusing to provide the combination for a safe. If there were safes that could keep them out indefinitely, anyway.
I suspect that they nailed him using ICAC's Black Ice app. It's a hacked version of the Freenet client that logs peer IPs, and tracks hashes that they handle. So his mistake was assuming that deniability was adequate, and failing to hit Freenet via Tor.
Edit: 2016-05-26 - Police department's tracking efforts based on false statistics: https://freenetproject.org/news.html#20160526-htl18attack
[+] [-] vivekd|9 years ago|reply
*edited changed from key to combination because combination locks are protected by the 5th amendment and keys are not.
[+] [-] headShrinker|9 years ago|reply
I know this is an old argument, but what if I put the contents in a paper shredder, in the safe? It's still the data, it's just that it went through the shredder. Why is ok for the government to compel you to change the state of the data from encrypted to unencrypted? They couldn't compel Apple write software to decrypt a phone. Why can they compel me to write an encryption key to decrypt data.
Discloser all of my data is encrypted, and if the government asked I would really be torn about giving them keys.
[+] [-] libertymcateer|9 years ago|reply
He didn't commit a crime. He is being held in jail for contempt of court. This is how the system works. This is no different than if a judge demanded that you turn over any other form of evidence - it should not be so shocking that you can be held in contempt for refusing to obey a court order.
It is bad, however, that he is being let to rot indefinitely. That is the problem here - not that he was jailed for contempt in the first place.
[+] [-] zhemao|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spaceboy|9 years ago|reply
In terms of being stopped and searched when traveling, I just carry a TailsOS bootable live USB. My laptop doesn't have a hard-drive and boots entirely from my TailsOS USB stick. I did not enable any persistent storage and any bookmarks I need to remember, I simply remember them by rote, like in that movie The Book of Eli[2]. My threat model is such that I don't want anybody knowing my business when traveling. The intrusiveness should only go so far as one question, like "Business or Pleasure?" and that's all.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#United_Stat...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Eli
[+] [-] godelski|9 years ago|reply
I know everyone wants to have a perfect justice system but we have to ALSO decide which direction we would like it to fail until that time comes (never). In essence cases like this are more about this question. When the system fails, which direction do we want it to fail in?
[+] [-] ust|9 years ago|reply
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
[+] [-] INTPenis|9 years ago|reply
My most important passwords (passphrases for gpg used by password managers and luks) are in my head and muscle memory.
When I update passwords I tend to have them written down until I've typed them enough times.
So after a months vacation I often struggle to remember my work password for example. While using phrases makes all this easier these days, 16 months is a long time to presumably spend without your keyboard.
[+] [-] payne92|9 years ago|reply
But being forced to divulge the virtual coordinates of his hidden data is somehow different...
[+] [-] thescriptkiddie|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keithnz|9 years ago|reply
Should law enforcement have a right to search through court orders? In a world of unbreakable locks it seems very hard to get justice unless the law can do proper searches. If we end up in a world of unbreakable encryption everywhere, seems to me, criminal activity will have huge benefits. If we can't control crime, we can't have a just society. We can't protect a individuals rights if they are undermined by criminals. Of course, it's also hard if the state has too much power to protect and individuals rights. But somewhere we need pragmatic compromises.
[+] [-] 9mit3t2m9h9a|9 years ago|reply
The police does parallel construction to avoid admitting access to illegally collected evidence, civil forfeiture to punish people for things police doesn't like without having to prove anything, etc — incentives for police to step over the rules are a larger problem than unbreakable encryption right now.
[+] [-] danbruc|9 years ago|reply
So this becomes the question where decrypting a hard drive lies on this spectrum. Is it more like testifying against yourself or is it more like allowing the police to search your home? Assuming one agrees with the way testifying against yourself and searching your home is currently handled by the law.
[+] [-] skrause|9 years ago|reply
In Germany you never have to actively help the police even if they come with a warrant. They can't even compel you to open the door of the house or a physical safe. They will of course come in anyway and send you the bill for the locksmith, but it's your perfect right to just sit there and do nothing.
So with the hard disk encryption it's actually exactly the same: You don't have to help in any way, but of course the police can still take the drive and try to decrypt it. If they can't decrypt, well, bad luck. Not your problem, you don't have to help.
[+] [-] hrehhf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] parhurs|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] stillsut|9 years ago|reply
Doesn't this whole situation and the threat thereof go away for 99.9% of the population if we decriminalize possession / "viewing" of child pornography? [Note: you could still be severely prosecuted for making it]
There doesn't appear to be anything else in the digital realm that can get you in such legal trouble. The only other thing I could think of is national defense espionage, or rogue WMD plans. And on these counts, 99.9% of people are going to be very difficult to put a plausible frame job for these crimes. Sure the 0.1% with security clearance could be framed here, but as far as I understand, that's a personal decision and risk each person go to make for themselves.
If you deny the prosecution the ability to use reasonable suspicion of CP to search, or compel a decryption of your digital files, it's going to be a long time before another case like this.
[+] [-] sean2|9 years ago|reply
The list goes on. It just so happens the FBI is obsessed with CP, but if you decriminalize that, we'll have the same problems with other crimes.
[+] [-] downandout|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fred_is_fred|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Beatty_Chadwick
I mention this because there are parallels. In each case the man would say "I don't have the (key|money)" and in each case the judge can effectively sentence them to indefinite jail.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hysan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digler999|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] planetjones|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelmrose|9 years ago|reply
Failing that they can convict him based on other evidence or at least convince him that they can and cut a deal for access.
In the vital cases which are normally cited as examples of why we must allow cops to violate our right options abound.
What's left is petty crap and police incompetence which serve as poor justification for giving up our rights.
[+] [-] coldtea|9 years ago|reply
Why do we care for people distributing "illegal material" in the first place?
And how come this "illegal material" doesn't ever get decrypted? Catch them then.
[+] [-] remotebug|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamdave|9 years ago|reply
"Bad guys" still have fifth amendment protection. You prosecute, satisfy the burden of proof and hope a jury convicts. That's what you do.
Outside of that, if you really want this changed, petition your representative to repeal the fifth amendment, I suppose?
[+] [-] terminado|9 years ago|reply
Sure, that's an obtuse abstraction, but honestly, the buck stops there. At the end of the day, they have a circuit encoded in a given state. Magnetic media that can be arbitrarily degaussed.
It's not real.
Stop prosecuting it.
So, okay, you wanna argue. Let's get more specific.
Bad things people can "have" encoded on their digital storage media:
Listen. If it can fit onto a credit card sized device, it's already too late. So nothing is being stopped by this sort of search.The demand for relinquishing data, in any such situation is not unlike demanding all the things that people write on napkins and envelopes. Every scrap of paper in someone's pocket. Movie tickets, dry cleaning stubs, match books, and so on. Evidence of a crime? Possibly. Is everyone guilty until proven innocent? Gee, I don't know. Maybe we should just make everyone empty their pockets, and take pictures, just in case.
The fact of that matter is that these are essentially fishing expeditions for item #3.
It's not about "illegal data" at all, nothing is ever going to divert ones and zeroes as contraband. That simply doesn't happen, and doesn't work. It's about coming up with reasons to harass people, as vectors into prosecuting other crimes. Smoking out the paranoid, so that they crack under the pressure of getting sweated down in the hot seat.
[+] [-] krick|9 years ago|reply
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13622684
[+] [-] dwaltrip|9 years ago|reply
If a suspect might have physically buried important evidence hundreds of miles of way in the middle of nowhere, such that it is effectively impossible to find, can the courts "compell" the suspect to give up any knowledge of this, in a similar fashion as the man in the article?
[+] [-] EGreg|9 years ago|reply
The best idea however is to have sensitive stuff stored encrypted on freenet, and log in using incognito browser sessions.
[+] [-] sologoub|9 years ago|reply
In Apple/Gov dispute on the San Bernardino iPhone case, Gov brought up the Burr case from 1807, arguing that a 3rd party could be compelled to decipher the contents, provided there was no self-incrimination (Apple argued Burr did not apply): http://www.macworld.com/article/3046095/legal/burrs-cipher-s...
Does anyone know if there has been an attempt to equate decryption to deciphering in US courts?
[+] [-] jwatte|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jillboy|9 years ago|reply
If that's the case, and it likely is, then that's pretty concrete proof that there IS something to decrypt.
edit: Actually, the article says that the hard drive was encrypt with Apple's FireVault, so there you go.
[+] [-] Zelmor|9 years ago|reply
Land of the Free - as long as you do not encrypt your shit, that is