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Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives

arstechnica.com

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Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives

#211

Post by jhiska »

__s wrote: post #198
mindslight wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not an activity I want to engage in or even associate with people who do, but a nonviolent private activity is not a reason to violently persecute someone, especially to this degree.

It's not a private activity, it directly supports an industry of violence against children

You can make the same argument for the adult porn industry, and that leads to one of two conclusions:

- That the viewer of adult porn shouldn't be prosecuted for viewing porn.

or

- That there is a societal / governmental acceptance of the exploitation of men and women, as long as they are adults.

The easy argument out of this hypocrisy is to claim that while children can never consent, adults can, but then that opens the can of worms of whether they're "consenting" under coercion, like under threat of not getting hired again to do work or if they're enslaved, and the answer to that is that it depends on the case.

At this point it turns political, with one side generalizing that most do consent, and another side also generalizing that most do not consent, and reaching an agreement is impossible because there is a half-truth to both sides, and after a lot of heated arguments, people get worn out, and nothing gets resolved.

So instead I'm just going to direct people to read up on the topic of victimology, which is a sub-genre of criminology, specifically how it affects human traffic (which are >90% women, and has a total volume of enslaved people higher than it was when slavery was legal) and get informed and then make up their own mind about it without bothering others.

Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives

#212

Post by mirimir »

iopq wrote: post #187
slantaclaus wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the background, but somebody has to say it: his failure was looking at child pornography.

But without 100% proof he can't be jailed. The prosecutors don't have enough evidence to prove it, so how can he be jailed for it already? "Innocent until proven guilty" is the foundation of our legal system

He's not jailed for having CP. He's jailed for contempt.

Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives

#213

Post by bigiain »

mirimir wrote: post #183
slantaclaus wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the background, but somebody has to say it: his failure was looking at child pornography.

Maybe. But we don't know whether he looked at CP or not.

And lets face it, the NSA claim - and win in court with this claim - that "collecting and storing" personal communications doesn't count as surveillance, until a human queries the database and reads from the collected interceptions.

While a personal hard drive full of child porn is unlikely to be "innocently" explained away quite that easily, I wonder if owners of, say, usenet binary hosting newsservers ever need to claim that defence?

Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives

#214

Post by coldtea »

throwanem wrote: post #178
coldtea wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? It doesn't hurt anybody physically anymore, and if it keeps those people of the streets on on their screens, even better. It's not like they're gonna be cured of their tendencies if they don't have access to such material.

Are you sure? There's a strong neurocognitive argument to be made that reinforcing the tendency, by repeatedly acting on it with pornography to the end of, among other things, rather strongly triggering the dopamine reward system, will tend to strengthen the interest by reinforcing the circuits which interact with it, and vice versa. I don't think anyone would argue this "cures" the tendency - certainly I will not! B…

Is there really such a strong argument about not reincorcing etc?? There were people with such tendencies for millennia before there was even the possibility of photographic reproduction of such images.

Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives

#215

Post by mindslight »

__s wrote: post #198
mindslight wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not an activity I want to engage in or even associate with people who do, but a nonviolent private activity is not a reason to violently persecute someone, especially to this degree.

It's not a private activity, it directly supports an industry of violence against children

This is a tenuous argument at best, even more so considering the protocol in question is freenet. Sure it's possible to force a commercial model onto any system, but I'd think freenet would be an especially terrible way to monetize. (And "industry" - seriously??)

Furthermore, there is presumably enough existing child pornography out there to satiate any viewer for their entire life. Perhaps increasing access to it is the way to discourage more being made! At any rate, paying for it could still be a crime, as opposed to the insanity of strict liability for bitstring possession.

Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives

#216

Post by morgante »

cortic wrote: post #171
godelski wrote: post #71

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 directi…

I've always been confused by this proposition; If there is an innocent person convicted of a crime, then there also has to be a guilty person that has gone free.. so it seems the ultimatum has to be "are we are willing to let a guilty person go free rather than let a guilty person go free and an innocent person go to jail." Which has a much more obvious answer..

That's assuming a hypothetical crime actually happened in the first place. In many cases it's possible that no crime ever happened. (For example, if the man in the article never actually had child porn that doesn't mean someone else did.)

Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives

#217

Post by mirimir »

bigiain wrote: post #210
iopq wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But without 100% proof he can't be jailed. The prosecutors don't have enough evidence to prove it, so how can he be jailed for it already? "Innocent until proven guilty" is the foundation of our legal system

There are other precedents I think. Here (Sydney Australia) the penalty for refusing a roadside alcohol test is the same as the top range blood alcohol penalty. So you can refuse a test, and they'll penalise you assuming the worst-case result you could have produced. I'm guessing this guy is in a quite perplexing quandary - he's betting on whether they'll keep him in jail for as long for refusing to decrypt the drive…

If he was using Freenet, there's no doubt that his node handled chunks of CP files, and that at least some of those chunks remain on the drive. Let's say that he never viewed any CP. Even then, can he be sure that investigators won't discover evidence that could be spun to demonstrate that he did view CP?

It is quite a quandary :(

Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives

#218

Post by headShrinker »

externalreality wrote: post #31

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,…

> 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.

Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives

#220

Post by mirimir »

morgante wrote: post #207
mirimir wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was pretty much inevitable :( > 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…

> Well, you could also be held indefinitely for refusing to provide the combination for a safe. Is there case law supporting that? Traditionally I think the combination would be considered forced testimony.

Sorry, I got confused. In the US, keys can be compelled, but not combinations.[0] But the tide seems to be turning :(

0) https://www.quora.com/Can-a-search-warrant-compel-me-to-unlo...

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