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Indefinite prison for suspect who won’t decrypt hard drives, US government says

arstechnica.co.uk

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Re: Indefinite prison for suspect who won’t decrypt hard drives, US government says

#81

Post by hiq »

probably_wrong wrote: post #71

I agree with the overall idea that this is an interesting/problematic case, but I think the discussion would be better served if we stopped assuming that the authorities here are morons. No, forgetting your password is not a lifetime sentence. No, not knowing the password for an item you've never seen is not a lifetime sentence either. Refusing to obey a judge's order, however, will get you in trouble. Again, these p…

The reasons are stated in the article (the suspect never mistyped his password, and always remembered it), and addressed by the commentators you criticize (under pressure and after seven months without typing it, it is not impossible that you forget a possibly complicated password).

Even if you think that chances are high that the guy both is guilty of some crime and remembers the password, that still leaves the "what if he is actually innocent and actually forgot his password" case. Indefinite prison sure seems a hard sentence in the latter case, which you cannot refute beyond reasonable doubt.

Re: Indefinite prison for suspect who won’t decrypt hard drives, US government says

#82

Post by cauterized »

upofadown wrote: post #38

>... it's a "foregone conclusion" that illegal porn is on the drives, ... Obviously not if the government needs the suspect to tell them where to find the porn in the keyspace. The porn at this point literally does not exist on the computer. The government is asking the suspect to find it for them there. So the question here is; can the government compel someone to help the government find evidence against them? This…

Pretty sure that's in violation of the fifth amendment (self-incrimination).

Re: Indefinite prison for suspect who won’t decrypt hard drives, US government says

#83

Post by [deleted] »

INTPenis wrote: post #10
maremmano wrote: post #3

and what happens if I forgot my password?

>The defendant, who is referred to as "John Doe" in court papers, claims he forgot the passwords. The suspect's identity is Francis Rawls, according to trial court papers. > In fact, Doe had multiple layers of password protection on his devices, and he always entered his passcodes for all of his devices from memory. Doe never had any trouble remembering his passcodes (other than when compelled to do so by the federal…

[deleted]

Re: Indefinite prison for suspect who won’t decrypt hard drives, US government says

#84

Post by jdmichal »

throwaway7767 wrote: post #51
tptacek wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not in fact settled law that unlocking an encrypted drive is testimonial. It's also worth remembering that the primary motivation for 5A is to prevent false, coerced testimony and torture; when SCOTUS eventually deals with this, they could find that no protected substantive rights are threatened by demands to unlock encrypted media. We're unlikely to get it both ways: both a right to strong encryption without g…

Realistically, how can we differentiate between a suspect who's refusing to unlock something, and a suspect who has genuinely forgotten his password? I know for myself, even with passwords I use multiple times a day from memory, it only takes a couple of months of not using them before I cannot recall them again. This guy has been locked up for 7 months. See also the numerous people who stored bitcoin in brain wallet…

> I know for myself, even with passwords I use multiple times a day from memory, it only takes a couple of months of not using them before I cannot recall them again. This guy has been locked up for 7 months.

You have the timeline reversed. He's been locked up for 7 months because he refuses to decrypt the drives.

Re: Indefinite prison for suspect who won’t decrypt hard drives, US government says

#85

Post by nicolapcweek94 »

DennisP wrote: post #78
cypherpunks01 wrote: post #63

This certainly points towards having more widespread support for plausible deniability, no? Are there any mass encryption tools that are reasonably simple to set up providing this (besides TrueCrypt Hidden Volumes)? Would someone continue to be held in contempt if they furnished a decrypted drive that didn't contain the information that court held as a "foregone conclusion" that it contained?

Why besides TrueCrypt?

because it's supposed to be broken and/or backdoored since may 2014 when the development abruptly stopped and weird warnings appeared on the official site to switch to alternative programs

Re: Indefinite prison for suspect who won’t decrypt hard drives, US government says

#86

Post by avar »

falcolas wrote: post #72
avar wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coming up with real fake evidence is a lot harder than just coming up with a random blob that the cops think is evidence the suspect is hiding. E.g. are you really able to carefully craft a filesystem image that you're sure has no metadata that proves the innocence of the suspect?

Eh, not so hard. Proxy their internet for a browsing session, and you put thumbnails of images in their cache. If they have any encrypted drive, or any encrypted blobs (could push those into their cache as well), and they're not going to have a great day. Cached images has been enough to put away more than a few folks - there was also recently a story about using exactly that tactic against a suspected spy.

This is really moving the goalpost from the grandparent's comment of "encrypt a zip drive with drivel, toss it in his car and call the cops".

Yes of course you can get an active MiTM session going you can do a lot of shady stuff.

Re: Indefinite prison for suspect who won’t decrypt hard drives, US government says

#87

Post by Programmatic »

sspiff wrote: post #55
Kristine1975 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A zip drive with no fingerprints of the person it supposedly belongs to? Not very convincing. Also in this case the prosecution apparently has a bit more information that just "he did it": A subsequent forensic exam of his Mac Pro computer revealed that Doe had installed a virtual machine ... the examiner found one image of what appeared to be a 14-year-old child wearing a bathing suit and posed in a sexually suggest…

Wouldn't stop the police from keeping him behind bars. "He went through the trouble of encrypting the drive and keeping it clean from prints, but we found it in his car. He's clearly a well organized, determined child porn consumer." Perhaps you have too much faith in law enforcement, or I have grown too cynical by what I perceive as the dawn of a new era of police states.

I am no fan of compelled decryption, and believe it is a violation of 5th amendment rights. That being said, I think the government's argument is stronger than usual having proven that he has accessed files regularly in the encrypted drive by showing logs of regular access to content with suspicious filenames.

The police have a fundamentally different argument here than "it happened to be in his possession".

Re: Indefinite prison for suspect who won’t decrypt hard drives, US government says

#88

Post by striking »

nicolapcweek94 wrote: post #85
DennisP wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why besides TrueCrypt?

because it's supposed to be broken and/or backdoored since may 2014 when the development abruptly stopped and weird warnings appeared on the official site to switch to alternative programs

Although, who really knows at this point. Judge for yourself what happened: https://mastermind.atavist.com/he-always-had-a-dark-side

Re: Indefinite prison for suspect who won’t decrypt hard drives, US government says

#89

Post by danielweber »

nicolapcweek94 wrote: post #85
DennisP wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why besides TrueCrypt?

because it's supposed to be broken and/or backdoored since may 2014 when the development abruptly stopped and weird warnings appeared on the official site to switch to alternative programs

There's no evidence it's been "backdoored since may 2014." There were no changes at that point in time.

Re: Indefinite prison for suspect who won’t decrypt hard drives, US government says

#90

Post by mpnordland »

oarsinsync wrote: post #26
dkersten wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to comment the same thing. If I'd been imprisoned for 7 months, there's a good chance I'd forget my password manager master password too... I remember it now because I enter it multiple times a day. After 7 months, under duress and stress? I'm not sure if I would...

Meanwhile a laptop I didn't access for 3 months has a boot password (that I must not have needed for >3 months ontop of that) is now locked away and without any ability for me to login to. And that was without going to prison

Open it up and remove the CMOS battery for a while then replace it. That will remove a BIOS password. OTOH, if you encrypted the drive...
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