To me, this is incredibly perverse: no one should be forced to assist the government in their own prosecution.
Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives
231–240 of 504 posts
Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There were also people for millennia who died of diseases now easily treatable and indeed routinely treated. Does this constitute an argument against modern medicine?
Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives
#233Earlier 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…
This sounds like a strong argument is there peer reviewed support for it?
Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives
#234I have a question... 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…
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.
He did claim he'd forgotten the keys. Maybe he changed his mind on that later, but I haven't seen any statement of the sort.
Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives
#235"I forgot the password" Problem solved.
"I'm sorry sir, as personal encryption is classified as a munition there is a legal requirement that you must take proper care to ensure that you are able to respond to all lawful requests for decryption. This carries a penalty of 2-5 years in prison and a fine of $10,000."
This is a terrible precedent people don't always throw away old computers and are bad at remembering passwords
Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Bogus defense IMHO. Acquiring the ability to query a database is enough to constitute surveillance. I wonder if my land lord could use the same logic to legally record me in the shower. We have to understand that, much like it's a military's responsibility (and desire) to go to war, it is the goal of spy agencies to gather all the intelligence it possible can. In both cases it is up to law making bodies comprised of…
I completely agree with you. It baffles me that anybody can stand up in front of their peers and claim "bulk collection" doesn't violate your privacy until/unless some human ever reads the data you've collected, and it's beyond parody that a judge in a court agreed with this example of mental gymnastics...
Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives
#237He shouldn't have to decrypt his hard drives, and I support his decisions. The problems with this are numerous. First of all no one has any duty to provide the police with evidence as a 5th amendment protection. It's not a "right" for the police at all to have. Imprisoning someone for failure to disregard their constitutional rights is absurd. They have no evidence to hold him period.
I think the idea of 16 months for contempt is legally ridiculous. However, they have some evidence. I presume their de-construction of freenet will have given them some insight. The technical issue that concerns me, and I'm not sure if they have addressed, is how freenet stores data and whether the material they allege is his or a 3rd party's. Last time I looked into freenet it was doing the equivalent of storing chu…
Yes, it's a bit crazy the way Freenet works, like mad scientist crazy.
> Freenet not only transmits data between nodes but actually stores them, working as a huge distributed cache.
> While users can insert data into the network, there is no way to delete data. Due to Freenet's anonymous nature the original publishing node or owner of any piece of data is unknown. The only way data can be removed is if users don't request it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet#Distributed_storage_an...
You allocate a certain amount of space on your machine to an encrypted cache, that you can't even decrypt yourself or even know what it contains.
So there's no way to prove that someone even accessed a certain chunk of data, unless they saved it unencrypted to their machine, which I guess is what the Feds need to prove.
Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about the possibility that this guy (or someone else similarly situated) might legitimately not have the password to unlock the volume? I have old hard drives and computers in my basement for which I'm quite sure I don't recall the root password. Edited to add: I'm not coming out pro-child-pornography, but I think the EFF has it 100% correct here. From the article: The Electronic Frontier Foundation told the cou…
Then his lawyer can argue that, but instead they are arguing the Fifth Amendment. The question is rather, does the Constitution render the court order illegal?
They have no obligation to believe him or release him in that case even if he did forget it.
Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can he appeal this judge's decision to imprison him? Or is he trapped given the lack of a conviction?
They are appealing, but it's not on any rushed schedule so the appeals court is just leaving him in there.
It's not as unjust as it seems because he does have the option of applying for a bail pending appeal which would release him until his appeal date. Unfortunately to do that you have to show that you have a reasonable chance of succeeding, and he doesn't have that. He's going to lose the appeal and he's going to stay in jail until he divulges the info or the judge releases him.
Just to give a bit more info here, this is not an unsophisticated defendant, this guy is a cop he knows the system and he knows what he's doing. He knows that he's better off going to jail for contempt of court than he is going to jail for kiddie porn. He's making a calculated decision to keep himself out of trouble, he's no martyr.
Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives
#240Not 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,…
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…
Some are arguing that the court has no right to order him to do so. 5th amendment and some case rulings are mentioned.