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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

#471

Post by sean2 »

stillsut wrote: post #425

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 thi…

No, plenty of other stuff is illegal; just off the top of my head: Possession of copy-righted material Possession of hacking tools Evidence of hacking Data from corporate espionage Accounting fraud Fraud (e.g. fake credit info) Evidence of other crimes (e.g. account books of drug deals) Plans to commit other crimes

The list goes on. It just so happens the FBI is obsessed with CP, but if you decriminalize that, we'll have the same problems with other crimes.

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

#472

Post by PostOnce »

PostOnce wrote: post #332
sschueller wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obama quietly signed the following in January: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/294...

Quietly? is that a necessary or even applicable verb here? It's public record, he was the President of the United States, and it's a major budgetary act for the biggest military in the world and covered by hundreds of news agencies. Are you quite sure he signed it quietly?

Well I can't edit my now-0 comment, but the point is, slipping in words like "quietly" assigns an intent which may not be present. As though Obama were trying to sneak the NDAA past everyone.

It's hard to covertly sign any legislation as the president, notwithstanding secret courts and laws (fisa, patriot act secret interpretations, etc).

Just saying, we don't need to try to make people think a certain way by guiding them with weasel words, people can read facts and make a judgement, without trying to subtly assign some bias in either direction.

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

#473

Post by belovedeagle »

cookiecaper wrote: post #440
brw12 wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're exactly wrong. The demand on Rawls is that he do whatever work is necessary to produce the drives in an unencrypted state. If he hid a printout of the password on Mount Everest, that means he is compelled by the court to climb Mount Everest.

I'm speaking in practical terms here. I haven't read the actual order, but I understand the language of the order may technically require him to do the work necessary to render his drives in a decrypted state. That's because they expect the only requirement to be entering the key. If he had a password hidden on Mt. Everest and demonstrated that to the court's satisfaction, and then cooperated with the court's order t…

This explanation (and the other forms in which it's presented in this thread) is really troubling to me. It sounds like in order to offer a defense of the inability to comply with the order, the accused has to provide evidence which could be used against him in the trial. In your example, the existence of the password on Mt Everest could be used against him, and was evidence the prosecution probably could not have discovered but for his compelled testimony. It's even more troubling in the case of the Sherpa: revealing the identity of an accomplice (as it were) is surely self-incriminating!

But if this were really how he obtains the password (and similar schemes of off-site passwords and accomplices aren't so outlandish in the case of servers which might require the keys on reboot a few times per year), how could he possibly defend himself from the contempt charge? It sickens me to imagine being in the same situation. If this isn't an instance of the cruel trilemma, I don't know what is =(

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

#474

Post by hysan »

digler999 wrote: post #414
hysan wrote: post #325

What happens if the drives develop bit rot over those 16 months preventing them from ever being decrypted? Based on the wording of what he is in contempt of, it sounds like he would sit in jail until death. To me, it sounds like the prosecution is trying to play a word game to get around 5th amendment protections.

investigators image drives, they dont work with the originals.

I know that, but read the exact wording they used to define why he is in contempt and what he has to do. That's the important part.

But I'll play along with your pedantic game. First, the wording says to give over his computer and hard drives. What if those hard drives failed? He can't handover the literal hard drives anymore.

Ok, you say it can be any hard drive then. The court will provide replacements and the disk images. If investigators providing those materials is allowed as a means to allow Rawls to complete said task, that means Rawls is allowed access to materials the court (or prosecution or him or some other entity) deems necessary. Not a big deal, right? Wrong. Going down that rabbit hole can lead to a slippery slope where courts can abuse the power of the wording to indefinitely contain anyone given that they assign them a task that "can" be completed with the given materials. However, the feasibility of the task may or may not be reasonable.

It's the twisting of the law through evasive language that is the problem here. They are deliberately avoiding the 5th Amendment by deploying language that skirts the letter of the law and ignores the intention/spirit of it.

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

#475

Post by dang »

kakarot wrote: post #408
cookiecaper wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Please don't conduct any more ideological flamewars on HN. It's definitely not what this site is for.

Also, please be civil to others when commenting here.

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

#476

Post by dang »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #382

On the other hand there's no misinterpretation involved in recognising Mohammed as being a murderous war-lord who condoned rape and pillage; and also being the Islamic model of a perfect person.

We warned you before about religious flamewars on HN. We won't ban you this time, even though it's nauseating to see a comment like this on HN, because your recent history looks reasonably in keeping with the site rules. But if you post anything like this again, we will.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13630895 and marked it off-topic.

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

#477

Post by guard-of-terra »

ghurtado wrote: post #463
guard-of-terra wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you ever persuade people to respect principles underlying the law when you fail to punish people who are the law? Modern justice is all like this: We know this guy perpetrated, but it was some time ago and he's well connected and it's awkward for us so we're going to "hate his sin" but without any effect on his well-being. But you, dear listeners, please behave. Ah, on unrelated note, we jailed a poor perso…

Those are all justice problems, but you are proposing to fix them with "revenge" type solutions. Is this maybe a cultural thing? Is vengeance a commonplace solution to problems in your culture?

Why is it revenge if passed as a law?

Indeed, recent years by Putin, Erdogan and Obama show that you can pass a lot of things as a law and everybody has to comply. To any kind of insane dung!

Unfortunately, not. Because in my culture, the commonplace handling of problems is not solving them but just piling up and then dying when they topple over.

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

#478

Post by teddyh »

MHP47 wrote: post #470
teddyh wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Other co-author here.) We did do that, yes. (I’m not sure what support or investing would mean in this context.) A Windows programmer could probably port the server side program (which holds the passwords) relatively easily, since it is currently implemented as a normal daemon in Python, and could therefore conceivably be ported or re-written to suit any Internet-connected platform, and the network protocol is fully…

Had to reset my password to login to write this. I love the idea of Mandos, but I've had some trouble setting it up and getting it working in the past :( And there doesn't seem to be much help on the internet; most guides are flimsy with no real information in them

I’m both sorry and surprised about that, since I thought we had documented everything appropriately. The thing to do after installing the mandos-client package, for instance, is to read /usr/share/doc/mandos-client/README.Debian.gz. That file contains the instructions for setting it up, and also the command to verify that it works before rebooting.

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

#479

Post by scotty79 »

cookiecaper wrote: post #452
scotty79 wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I know how to open that thing that you have a lawful order to investigate, and you don't, so any crime of which I'm suspected is now uninvestigatable, nanny nanny boo boo" So "I know stuff about a thing that you have a lawful order to investigate, and you don't, so any crime of which I'm suspected is now uninvestigatable, nanny nanny boo boo" is fine, real and serious, but "I know a thing that would allow you to o…

>So "I know stuff about a thing that you have a lawful order to investigate, and you don't, so any crime of which I'm suspected is now uninvestigatable, nanny nanny boo boo" is fine, real and serious No, this isn't fine. If there is a lawful order to gather evidence related to the crime, the accused can be compelled to comply. For example, the accused can be compelled to provide documentation under subpoena, submit t…

> They cannot be compelled to testify against themselves.

In my joking statement (that mirrored yours) I was referring to exactly that. Giving police information that currently is only inside a mind of a suspect. Not documents, not physical keys, not anything else.

I don't care that you can be compelled to provide documents. Which is silly by itself. Whole business of law should expect no cooperation from the suspect and should accept help from him with suspicion. Giving him opportunity to provide documents is giving him opportunity to forge some. Giving him opportunity to provide password to a machine may give him opportunity to give one that will cause the machine to overwrite the data you are trying to gain access to. Giving him opportunity to confess without double checking every bit of information he discloses with hard evidence is providing him the opportunity to take fall for someone else's crime.

> But there is no exceptional injustice underway here. This is the way the system works.

So the system is just temporarily exceptionally unjust. Unless you can somehow say that jailing a guy indefinitely for failing to disclose information only he poses, at the same time having not enough evidence that he committed any crime, is somehow just.

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