So the police no longer need to plant drugs. They can just plant encrypted hard drives to which you have 'forgotten' the password. Hard-drives containing hashes of 'bad' pics. And then you can spend your life in jail (unless you plead guilty) ?
If they're going to do that, they might as well just leave the pictures unencrypted. I don't see how encrypting it and then going through all these gymnastics in court helps them; in fact doing that seems like a good way to draw unnecessary attention to the frame job.
As the note at the bottom of the article implies, "hashes" of files on an encrypted disk? WTF?
"Bleeping Computer users have pointed out that you cannot match file hashes to encrypted content. The article was updated with a link to court documents from where the prosecution's statement was cited."
Did you read? He showed the pictures to his sister so the court is reasonable certain that he does know the password. If that's the case then he lied to police which is an offense in itself.
> The court also noted that the authorities "found [on the Mac Book Pro] one image depicting a pubescent girl in a sexually suggestive position and logs that suggested the user had visited groups with titles common in child exploitation." They also said the man's sister had "reported" that her brother showed her hundreds of pictures and videos of child pornography. All of this, according to the appeals court, meant that the lower court lawfully ordered Rawls to unlock the drives.
And then this from Rawls' public defender:
> "The fact remains that the government has not brought charges," Donoghue said in a telephone interview. "Our client has now been in custody for almost 18 months based on his assertion of his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination."
There are numerous quotes from Comey and many others in the FBI and DOJ who have argued that forced decryption is necessary to catch the bad guys. But here the argument is the exact opposite: the evidence they have is so overwhelming that it is a "foregone conclusion" that more of the same incriminating evidence is on the encrypted drive.
> The court also noted that the authorities "found [on the Mac Book Pro] one image depicting a pubescent girl in a sexually suggestive position and logs that suggested the user had visited groups with titles common in child exploitation." They also said the man's sister had "reported" that her brother showed her hundreds of pictures and videos of child pornography.
The fact that hey have so much evidence and yet they still prefer to lock him up in jail until he decrypts the drive rather than convict him makes me believe this case is intended to provide jurisprudence in order to force other people to unlock encrypted devices in much more dubious cases.
Not unlike the "locked iPhone" case where terrorists had destroyed all the devices that could be of interest and yet the FBI went against Apple because the case appeared very good to get support in the public eye (it's to catch terrorists!).
> "The fact remains that the government has not brought charges," Donoghue said in a telephone interview. "Our client has now been in custody for almost 18 months based on his assertion of his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination."
To be clear (and I am pretty sure the public defender knows this, but is just phrasing it like this for public perception), the prosecution's position is that the Fifth Amendment is irrelevant because they're compelling him to do an act under the All Writs Act and not to testify about anything (produce a password, produce files, etc.). The approach they're taking is that he's a person in a position to do something to let the government access evidence, and it doesn't matter that he's the person they want evidence against, instead of a third party (as with New York Telephone Co., or more recently Apple), and he's in prison for refusing compliance with the writ.
It's totally unclear that this legal strategy should work in a just/ideal society, but, at least for now, the courts are allowing it.
Well, it is also bullshit to require the subject of an investigation to assist in their own investigation. I don't care what the laws says - it's wrong.
If there is such overwhelming evidence that it's a foregone conclusion, then I wonder why they haven't charged and convicted the man already. Why do they need any cooperation at all?
When the FBI used the All Writs Act against Apple to attempt to force Apple to bypass the password functions of an iPhone or develop a backdoor method of access, the courts ruled that decryption was not a violation of the Fifth Amendment "if the contents were a foregone conclusion."
So if "foregone conclusion" is the criteria that must be met, I have to ask how the contents of this man's external hard drive could be conclusively a foregone conclusion. Maybe he did download thousands of images. What if he no longer possess them? He could have deleted them. The police have been known to make mistakes and have made high profile mistakes' i.e., the Atlanta Olympics bombing when they all but destroyed Richard Jewell.
What if he decrypted it and there was no child porn but there were records of say a store selling drugs etc on the dark net? Then he would have incriminated himself for something they had zero knowledge about because the court issued this writ.
The government states that his sister acknowledges him showing her many explicit photos. Did she turn in her brother? Why would a man show his sister pornographic images? Did she tell anyone around the time this happened that this occurred? Seems to me to be unusual at the least for the government to hang their hat on something uncorroberated. If the sister had access to the computer' who is to say that she did not download the images. He could have seen them and deleted them. Seems that a mere he said -she said is enough to have the government invade your privacy and demand you willingly set aside your consistutional protections or risk going to jail when you have not been charged with, let alone convicted of, a crime.
We have to be very careful when we start seeing civil liberties and constitutional protections erode. Tech companies have been under siege from the government's use of the All Writs Act in the last two decades and as long as they are successful, I do not foresee them changing their methods.
The "forgone conclusion" argument makes no sense to me. If there's enough evidence that the conclusion is "forgone", what is there to gain by decrypting the contents?
"Investigators said content stored on the encrypted hard drive matched file hashes for known child pornography content."
If the disk is encrypted how can they match file hashes? Do they encrypt known CP files with the FileVault key and then compare? If so, isn't that enough to convict him?
I think, importantly and regardless of the crime itself, I would like to ask: what can be done here and how did we get to this point? We have someone who has been in prison indefinitely who hasn't been charged with anything. What can be done about this situation even if we raise awareness? Also, how did we get to the point where this is legal?
I think this is not the hill you want to die on. Everything points to this guy being guilty and the court of public perception would not be on your side. Though it does seem possible that they are using this case to set a precedent for future, less clear-cut cases.
Absolutely but I'll go further. Having something in your hard drive or book or whatever should never be a crime in itself. I mean in India it is a crime to carry an authentic map of India with you.
What harm does the contents of an encrypted disk do to society? It is not like he was going out and trying to legalize child abuse. If the person was involved in child abuse, we must try to convict him absolutely but we should be able to do that without what's on the hard disk.
Oh and while I have your attention I'd like the reader to look up something unrelated but still very important. Look up cfaa. If you're in the us, please help repeal it!
Trump quite explicitely promised to double on police and prosecutor power. If what you want is better protection for accused, Trump is last person you should vote for.
CP is a wedge tool for politicians. Want to get around the Constitution while having public opinion on your side? Use a pedophile. I don't have a problem sending people to jail who produce the stuff, but the idea that I could put images in someone's computer, call the cops, and get them put away didn't sit right with me.
This case in particular is troublesome. There are lots of bogus claims by the prosecution like being able to confirm the CP via hashes despite the content being encrypted. If they truly had a strong case against this guy, they'd go to trial.
When I was in jail for only a month, I forgot a password I had recently changed, and when I got back home I ended up having to reformat my hard drive and lost a lot of old data. Poems, prose, music, images from my childhood... (well, what was left from recovering a failed drive from a year earlier, anyways)
Put me in jail for a year or two and I'll probably lose access to everything I own.
> The suspect appealed the indefinite prison sentence twice, but both appeals failed. His lawyers tried to argue that holding him breaches his Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate himself, but appeal judges did not see it that way. Judges pointed out that the Fifth Amendment only applies to witnesses and that the prosecutors didn't call him as a witness but only made a request for him to unlock his device, hence Fifth Amendment protections did not apply.
> The government also said that Rawls doesn't have to provide them with his password anymore, as they only need him to perform the act of unlocking the hard drive.
Those two statements seem at great odds. If the government actually knows the password now, the only thing having the defendant himself unlock it does is make it some sort of testimonial fact. The prosecution will use the fact that the defendant unlocked the device himself a point to the jury.
I've got a few hard drives wiped with random data that looks like cipher text and yet it isn't and I don't know the password (but this can't be proven). Does this make me a criminal in the US?
Is democracy basically dead? There are all sorts of disturbing precedents being set over the last 10 years without any push back. Can anyone think of a single democracy, free speech, surveillance or rule of law issue that will get people on the street or even change their voting preference?
This is just the sort of hard case to set the right precedents about rule of law, you just can't lock someone up without trial. It goes against every know tenet of law.
If there is a rule of law that allows this, then it is basically not rule of law as we understand the word.
My best guess is that something on the unencrypted Mac Pro was referencing files on the encrypted drive. I'm not sure what kind of metadata macOS stores or what a third-party app would have, but it wouldn't be hard to imagine that something had hashes for files on the external drive.
How do they know the hashes are child pornography? Did they get that from the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children? Which is controlled by child porn "artist" Jeff Koons who was accused of his exwife of molesting their son?Once you can indefinitely detain someone for a hash, all the organized criminals have to do is control the body that responds to has requests and they can ruin or exonerate anyone. Too much power to rationally consider this risk, but we're allowing it to happen.
Does anyone understand the intent of the foregone conclusion doctrine? It seems like if something's a foregone conclusion, instead of overriding 5th amendment rights, they shouldn't even need whatever's being hidden in the first place. So why the doctrine?
Last time this story was here, I posted this link [1], from law prof. Orin Kerr. I find his reasoning about "foregone conclusion" and Fifth Amendment pretty interesting.
This guy is going to forget the password before this is resolved and then the argument will be about whether or not he has really forgotten. I look forward to seeing how this all plays out.
Given the could convict him right now, my guess is that they are trying to bargain in some way to get access to the HDDs as a way to 1) try to find the children being abused and 2) access a wider ring of child absusers etc.
Given the legal grey area this all appears to be in and the potential upside of getting in to the HDDs this seems like something the authorities would be ok doing while the law catches up.
Or they're using it as the case to challenge encryption. If this goes to the supreme court, a decision on this will set some major prescient on encryption.
[+] [-] lenkite|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johncolanduoni|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcguire|8 years ago|reply
"Bleeping Computer users have pointed out that you cannot match file hashes to encrypted content. The article was updated with a link to court documents from where the prosecution's statement was cited."
[+] [-] srge|8 years ago|reply
And what if you genuinely forget the password to one of your encrypted drive. Couldn't it be used to incriminate you on whatever charge?
[+] [-] slim|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2OEH8eoCRo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jancsika|8 years ago|reply
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/man-jailed-indef...
From that article:
> The court also noted that the authorities "found [on the Mac Book Pro] one image depicting a pubescent girl in a sexually suggestive position and logs that suggested the user had visited groups with titles common in child exploitation." They also said the man's sister had "reported" that her brother showed her hundreds of pictures and videos of child pornography. All of this, according to the appeals court, meant that the lower court lawfully ordered Rawls to unlock the drives.
And then this from Rawls' public defender:
> "The fact remains that the government has not brought charges," Donoghue said in a telephone interview. "Our client has now been in custody for almost 18 months based on his assertion of his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination."
There are numerous quotes from Comey and many others in the FBI and DOJ who have argued that forced decryption is necessary to catch the bad guys. But here the argument is the exact opposite: the evidence they have is so overwhelming that it is a "foregone conclusion" that more of the same incriminating evidence is on the encrypted drive.
[+] [-] JorgeGT|8 years ago|reply
The fact that hey have so much evidence and yet they still prefer to lock him up in jail until he decrypts the drive rather than convict him makes me believe this case is intended to provide jurisprudence in order to force other people to unlock encrypted devices in much more dubious cases.
Not unlike the "locked iPhone" case where terrorists had destroyed all the devices that could be of interest and yet the FBI went against Apple because the case appeared very good to get support in the public eye (it's to catch terrorists!).
[+] [-] geofft|8 years ago|reply
To be clear (and I am pretty sure the public defender knows this, but is just phrasing it like this for public perception), the prosecution's position is that the Fifth Amendment is irrelevant because they're compelling him to do an act under the All Writs Act and not to testify about anything (produce a password, produce files, etc.). The approach they're taking is that he's a person in a position to do something to let the government access evidence, and it doesn't matter that he's the person they want evidence against, instead of a third party (as with New York Telephone Co., or more recently Apple), and he's in prison for refusing compliance with the writ.
It's totally unclear that this legal strategy should work in a just/ideal society, but, at least for now, the courts are allowing it.
[+] [-] cmiles74|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djsumdog|8 years ago|reply
There is simply no way to prove he is knowingly withholding a password vs simply forgetting it.
[+] [-] Crontab|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threatofrain|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Powerofmene|8 years ago|reply
So if "foregone conclusion" is the criteria that must be met, I have to ask how the contents of this man's external hard drive could be conclusively a foregone conclusion. Maybe he did download thousands of images. What if he no longer possess them? He could have deleted them. The police have been known to make mistakes and have made high profile mistakes' i.e., the Atlanta Olympics bombing when they all but destroyed Richard Jewell.
What if he decrypted it and there was no child porn but there were records of say a store selling drugs etc on the dark net? Then he would have incriminated himself for something they had zero knowledge about because the court issued this writ.
The government states that his sister acknowledges him showing her many explicit photos. Did she turn in her brother? Why would a man show his sister pornographic images? Did she tell anyone around the time this happened that this occurred? Seems to me to be unusual at the least for the government to hang their hat on something uncorroberated. If the sister had access to the computer' who is to say that she did not download the images. He could have seen them and deleted them. Seems that a mere he said -she said is enough to have the government invade your privacy and demand you willingly set aside your consistutional protections or risk going to jail when you have not been charged with, let alone convicted of, a crime.
We have to be very careful when we start seeing civil liberties and constitutional protections erode. Tech companies have been under siege from the government's use of the All Writs Act in the last two decades and as long as they are successful, I do not foresee them changing their methods.
[+] [-] Veratyr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gscott|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sw00pur|8 years ago|reply
If that's the case he should give the FBI the key. That way he'll prove he wasn't possessing child pornography.
[+] [-] shaggerty|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xtanx|8 years ago|reply
If the disk is encrypted how can they match file hashes? Do they encrypt known CP files with the FileVault key and then compare? If so, isn't that enough to convict him?
[+] [-] SolaceQuantum|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stinkytaco|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heartbreak|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] godzillabrennus|8 years ago|reply
Then people wonder why the country elects Trump to shake things up.
This guy should stand trial or be let go.
[+] [-] mcny|8 years ago|reply
What harm does the contents of an encrypted disk do to society? It is not like he was going out and trying to legalize child abuse. If the person was involved in child abuse, we must try to convict him absolutely but we should be able to do that without what's on the hard disk.
Oh and while I have your attention I'd like the reader to look up something unrelated but still very important. Look up cfaa. If you're in the us, please help repeal it!
[+] [-] watwut|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alistproducer2|8 years ago|reply
This case in particular is troublesome. There are lots of bogus claims by the prosecution like being able to confirm the CP via hashes despite the content being encrypted. If they truly had a strong case against this guy, they'd go to trial.
[+] [-] lagadu|8 years ago|reply
As someone who has forgotten passwords in the past: this is outrageous.
[+] [-] kakarot|8 years ago|reply
Put me in jail for a year or two and I'll probably lose access to everything I own.
[+] [-] sjy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lsaferite|8 years ago|reply
> The government also said that Rawls doesn't have to provide them with his password anymore, as they only need him to perform the act of unlocking the hard drive.
Those two statements seem at great odds. If the government actually knows the password now, the only thing having the defendant himself unlock it does is make it some sort of testimonial fact. The prosecution will use the fact that the defendant unlocked the device himself a point to the jury.
[+] [-] Rjevski|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdpopescu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielharrison|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw2016|8 years ago|reply
This is just the sort of hard case to set the right precedents about rule of law, you just can't lock someone up without trial. It goes against every know tenet of law.
If there is a rule of law that allows this, then it is basically not rule of law as we understand the word.
[+] [-] snakeanus|8 years ago|reply
How on earth is this supposed to work? Unless they can decrypt the hard drives I am pretty sure that this is impossible to deduce.
Maybe he used freenet or something in his unencrypted hard drive?
[+] [-] rmwaite|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daodedickinson|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] libeclipse|8 years ago|reply
This makes zero sense. It would have to be an utterly terrible encryption program for anyone to be able to see the hashes of the encrypted files.
[+] [-] ust|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
[+] [-] onnimonni|8 years ago|reply
Can someone explain to me how it's possible to check file hashes in encrypted drive?
[+] [-] onnimonni|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dopamean|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonbarker87|8 years ago|reply
Given the legal grey area this all appears to be in and the potential upside of getting in to the HDDs this seems like something the authorities would be ok doing while the law catches up.
[+] [-] djsumdog|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] midnitewarrior|8 years ago|reply