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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

#421

Post by digler999 »

MaulingMonkey wrote: post #261
coldtea wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's the "abolish BS laws" hill. How about creating child pornography being a crime? That's what's actually hurtful.

One of the goals of anti-distribution laws is to quell e.g. a local market for foreign exploitation. It's similar to banning the trade of ivory - sure, it's illegal to hunt elephants in most jurisdictions, but it's sadly hard to enforce in some parts of the world. It's even harder to enforce when the promise of wealth inspires the desperate to violence - hence the goal of e.g. "conflict free diamonds" as well. It's t…

Ah, so like prohibition ? Cause that worked so well for alcohol and drugs ?

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

#423

Post by dang »

guard-of-terra wrote: post #2

The people who do this now will become old and helpless to, and it is our purpose to forget nothing and make sure their final years are thoroughly ruined.

You've posted plenty of uncivil comments to HN and we've given you plenty of warnings. If you continue to do this we are going to ban you.

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

#424

Post by sjy »

mildbow wrote: post #58
AckSyn wrote: post #17

He 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.

What happens if he says he doesn't remember his password anymore? ie: sits down, and seemingly tries to decrypt, but tries 1( or 50 times) and says "Oh shucks, I forgot"?

That's precisely what happened, and the judge didn't believe him, partly because he declined to say on oath that he had forgotten the password.

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

#425

Post by stillsut »

I really hate to be writing this but it seems like the only solution...

Doesn't this whole situation and the threat thereof go away for 99.9% of the population if we decriminalize possession / "viewing" of child pornography? [Note: you could still be severely prosecuted for making it]

There doesn't appear to be anything else in the digital realm that can get you in such legal trouble. The only other thing I could think of is national defense espionage, or rogue WMD plans. And on these counts, 99.9% of people are going to be very difficult to put a plausible frame job for these crimes. Sure the 0.1% with security clearance could be framed here, but as far as I understand, that's a personal decision and risk each person go to make for themselves.

If you deny the prosecution the ability to use reasonable suspicion of CP to search, or compel a decryption of your digital files, it's going to be a long time before another case like this.

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

#426

Post by sjy »

onion2k wrote: post #42
BigChiefSmokem wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I bet something led police to the hard drive in question in the first place. I wonder what "that" something was. In the U.S. you can be arrested and held for Reasonable Suspicion (or Probable Cause)

Whatever that was it clearly wasn't a criminal act or he'd have been charged for whatever it was. No further evidence has come to light after 16 months. That's far beyond "reasonable suspicion." If the police can't find evidence of a crime then this guy should be released, even if he's the reason they can't find it.

Incorrect – the defendant had an iPhone which contained indecent recordings of his niece, and had previously admitted to family members that he had a problem with child pronography, showing them a large collection on the computer that was connected to the hard drives he now claims to have forgotten how to decrypt. This is explained in government brief[1] which was linked in the article.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/fedsrawls...

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

#427

Post by mejari »

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.

Isn't the grandparent quote stating the opposite of what you've said here?

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

#428

Post by dllthomas »

sjy wrote: post #401
dllthomas wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fair enough.

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

#429

Post by dllthomas »

Freak_NL wrote: post #366
dllthomas wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

That might seem reasonable at first glance, but it tends to turn into a witch hunt — especially with modern day communication channels. That is, you are effectively dealing with punishment (by treating a suspect as a criminal and tarnishing their reputation before being convicted) by not applying the same rigour as the courts.

I agree that social condemnation - especially mass condemnation - is a form of punishment, and should be treated with corresponding care. But I reject the attempt to extend that to all related reasoning - it is specifically a question of requiring a high confidence for punishment.

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

#430

Post by grzm »

baddox wrote: post #359
grzm wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond reasonable doubt can admit that doubt does exist, it's just not reasonable to entertain it. 100% proof strongly implies that there is no doubt at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_doubt

That seems like a silly distinction. It's easy to come up with "unreasonable doubt" for any argument. "I doubt that, because a fairy whispered something to me in my sleep."

I've expressed my layman's understanding of reasonable doubt. How does your understanding differ?
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