Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 504 posts

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

#401

Post by sjy »

dllthomas wrote: post #299
EdHominem wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Says who? Neither of us saw it, so we can't know. There's a procedure though that we use to determine the likelihood of someone's guilt, based on evidence and legal arguments. Would you like to hear about it?

I think it's legitimate to say, in a discussion like this one where we're not dealing with punishment, that we should hold to a weaker standard (preponderance of evidence?) than should a criminal court. That said, as far as I'm aware the only evidence we've seen is that he's been accused of the crime. I don't what portion of accusations are false (or even a proxy like conviction rate in comparable situations).

There's a lot more evidence in the government brief, which was linked in the article.

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

#402

Post by amelius »

realo wrote: post #206

I 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…

Alice can also just embed the message into the noise of a JPEG file. A noisy image can be used for plausible deniability.

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

#403

Post by heptathorp »

elcct wrote: post #394
realo wrote: post #206

I 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…

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 =]

Mallory has created a file containing random data and planted it on Alice's drive. Then Mallory phones in an anonymous tip to the police...

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

#404

Post by amelius »

realo wrote: post #206

I 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…

Or Alice can just claim that the random file is the key to another encrypted file :)

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

#405

Post by Natanael_L »

cookiecaper wrote: post #385
Natanael_L wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like being forced to translate your own notebook written in code. Not my problem, get your own codebreakers to do it.

It's different because you can't verify the authenticity of the custom hand-rolled cipher. This is a request for the accused to produce the keys only, not to do the work of manually decoding.

In a way still testimonial. I must provide secrets that reveal information about myself.

It is literally the same as ordering me to tell them how to make sense of the unreadable data.

I'm not giving them a plaintext copy of something already existing elsewhere (assuming no unencrypted backups), but producing new information for them.

And unless you used FDE with full authentication (AEAD), which almost nobody does, there's nothing that says that this particular ciphertext represents the exact plaintext I've had at any given point in time.

With XTS mode (Truecrypt) you can cut and paste together different blocks from different ciphertexts under the same key for as long as they're in the right positions. Depending on how much you know about the computer and if you've got access to multiple backups, you can splice together something that even if it doesn't contain anything illegal, it would look suspicious and incriminating.

Consider for example LE getting your full file version history of a container from Dropbox.

And revealing the keys is a kind of testimony that you have had read/write access to the drive, and that it indeed is encrypted (not just random).

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

#406

Post by Natanael_L »

cookiecaper wrote: post #380
Natanael_L wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being forced to decode written notes to incriminate yourself is about equal to producing the password that decodes the encrypted data. In both cases you use a secret and some procedure to derive readable information from some other information. And in both cases, it is generally impossible to prove you are able to!

The difference is that if a defendant is forced to decode a unique cipher they've made up, there's no independent way to verify its contents. You can't prove that an investigator didn't say "Look, the only way you're going to ever get out of here is if you 'decode' this and make sure it says that you committed the crime." Whereas with a well-understood, industry-accepted cipher, you can use the key and obtain the evi…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13636040

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

#407

Post by kakarot »

iopq wrote: post #283
kakarot wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. That pretty much sums up what I was getting at. I understand the need for violence when one man attacks me or my family. And I understand the need for violence when one man attacks any human around me. These people break the Golden Rule and remove themselves from its binding contract of being treated equally. BUT, they still deserve to be treated fairly. Sometimes, even you can get them to see the error of…

The thing is, the person that attacks your family already broke the rule, so you can use violence against him. You can be 100% peaceful and the state will still use violence against you based on its own criteria.

I don't think you understand what I'm saying.

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

#408

Post by kakarot »

cookiecaper wrote: post #331
kakarot wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. That pretty much sums up what I was getting at. I understand the need for violence when one man attacks me or my family. And I understand the need for violence when one man attacks any human around me. These people break the Golden Rule and remove themselves from its binding contract of being treated equally. BUT, they still deserve to be treated fairly. Sometimes, even you can get them to see the error of…

This is just a very abstract way to say that you don't like some of the things that the state has characterized as crimes. That's fine, and you can utilize the organs of representative democracy to make your will on that point known (though a world where only violent crimes are recognized, like you're suggesting, is not usually considered appealing). However, attempting to trivialize the issue by abstracting it out t…

No, this is not a very abstract way of saying that. You straw-manned my argument. I am stating my views on state violence, and what power the state should have over others. And the state should never use violence, physical or psychological, to "compel" people to do anything. If they are a danger to society, then they can be locked away, but if they are not provably a danger to society in an uncompromised court of law, then that's it. Indefinite incarceration without legitimate reason is torture.

Are you telling me if I have a problem with the way my state is run I should call my local Republican state representatives and not discuss my views on a mature open forum? Gtfo with that shit, this isn't your forum my dude.

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

#409

Post by jessaustin »

followmoney wrote: post #400
Paul-ish wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do we get to choose to live in a world where that isn't the case? No? Why not? Or, maybe a better question is, why do you think you could legalize child porn easier than we could outlaw or end programs like PRISM?

Few powerful forces oppose legal child porn. Very little money is on the line with CP and very few powerful people would be diminished if CP was legal. To outlaw or end programs like PRISM you'd have to take on the entire political establishment, the military industrial complex and all branches of the judiciary and law enforcement. It'd be far easier to legalize CP than do away with PRISM and the like.

This is the right way to analyze the situation, except we must remember that CP is of instrumental value to the legal racket, which is closely allied to MIC. CP gets them in all sorts of dubious positions, and spending lots of sweet taxpayer money, that they otherwise couldn't justify. "Legalizing CP" wouldn't have the effects we seek on the legal system as a whole, because they'd substitute some other issue (if one had to guess, "intellectual property" probably has the interest of various power players...) so they could continue business as usual.
Post reply on HN