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

Take corporate espionage: sure proprietary files from my employer could end up on hard-drive. But that would mean the FBI is willing to in addition to frame me, pay someone to go in and steal from my company. That's the type of thing that get's someone's boss's boss canned.

Do you see how high the conspiracy is going here? And do you know how messy this type of action gets when you need all these different nefarious actors executing FrontPageHeadline news if caught.

As far as the Drugs.xls, or the MobsterAccountPayable.xls, there already exists much legal room to disqualify a one-off document, without some kind of physical evidence - e.g. a guy wearing a wire says "Hears the money to pay Tony the Muscle" and you say "cool" or the guy who runs a storage facility says thats the guy who came in two months ago and rented that locker where the drugs were found. That's why the police are so obsessed with getting these type non-digital evidence: because a conviction on pure digital grounds is almost impossible with a halfway decent lawyer.

The thing about CP it doesn't have to be congruent with any other aspect of your life or be verified by anything physical or any witness. Even the motive/rationale is he had disturbing sexual impulses deep in his heart and its common sense that he wouldn't revel these to anyone so let's just assume he does.

>"Yet, that doesn't stop Christians from misinterpreting the Muslim concept of jihad"

It's an explanation for the misinterpretation of jihad by non-Muslims. Why that comment should be allowed without the historic nature of Mohammed - based on Koran and Hadith, at least - being noted seems a little, shall we say, biased.

It's not a solely Christian thing to interpret jihad as [potentially] a bloody mode of aggression, it's inter alia an atheist, hindu, and indeed fundamentalist Muslim thing too.

AFAIR I've not been an initiator of something that could be interpreted as flamewars; your objection is noted.

I assume [flagged] means this is invisible to the thread? AFAIA there's no other way to respond, so please note that I'm not trying to disobey your edict, but instead to place my comment in context.

Judging the credibility of testimony is not only one of the primary activities of judges and juries, but, again, I categorically do not believe that you truly believe there is no difference, whatsoever, in indicia or outward evidence, between telling a lie and telling the truth. It's not a remotely credible position to take. It is absolutely the case that humans can be very bad at judging the difference between lying and telling the truth, but the assertion that there is no observable difference is nonsense. It is the reason there are such a thing as "good" actors and bad actors. It is the reason that athletic events in movies are staged, as opposed to actually performed. It is why special effects exist.

Additionally, these judgments are made in context. You aren't judging the atomic, context-less testimony of a spherical witness on a perfectly cubical witness stand suspended in an infinite vacuum. You are judging a human, sitting in a court, in the context of a whole host of other evidence and testimony. So, basically, you are making one of two claims: (1) that humans cannot judge the difference between truth and lies and (2) that it is improper for humans to make these judgments in the context of criminal justice. I disagree with both, but in this case all that matters is the latter - I will cede that it is often the case that humans mess up on individual judgments, but this does not mean that putting humans in charge of these decisions is not the best option we have when it comes to criminal justice.

What you are pointing out is that justice gets tested at the edge cases - and what we have here is an edge case. I understand the engineer's desire to have proof-positive, objectively testable indicia to differentiate between different case-states - in this instance, the difference between being a convincing liar and telling the truth - but that is the central reason we have a court system that is populated and run by humans and not machines. Our "best guess" is what it comes down to. This does, in fact, result in miscarriages of justice - there are supposed to be correcting mechanisms built into this system to compensate for this as well, and the general release-valve for these errors is the idea that you are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. We have, in fact, stumbled upon a bug in this system here - judges can incarcerate individuals for contempt indefinitely, and this should not be the case. There are other factors going on in this circumstance that render the issue more complicated, and there are ways to address this bug with procedure - hearings, appeals, evidentiary testimony or expert testimony - but to simply state that the solution is to make the system recognize that it is impossible to tell the difference between truth and lies is an absurd notion that totally undermines its very foundation. It is not just throwing the baby out with the bath-water - it is then bulldozing the house too.

It is a primitive, or axiom, of the court system, that humans can be asked to make value judgments about the truth and falsity of assertions presented to them and to judge the veracity of the witnesses making those statements. If you categorically disagree with that axiom, you disagree with the entire jurisprudence system. In this case, I'd like to quote Churchill, when talking about Democracy:

"It's the worst form of Government, except for every other."

If you have a better idea about how to run the court system, I'm all ears.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_drawn_pornogra...