131–140 of 413 posts
Sitting directly in front of me are two moderately large encrypted hard drives the passwords for which I forgot. If I get a subpoena to produce their contents, I will potentially remain in jail of the rest of my life for the crime of being forgetful. That judge's behavior and (the laws that enables it) is sickening. You either have enough evidence to convict a person, or you don't.
The Court's opinion explicitly addresses that (at 18-19). It first recognizes that impossibility of compliance is a defense to a contempt charge. But it then explains why the trial judge reasonably did not buy that argument: > At the contempt hearing, the Government presented several witnesses to support its prima facie case of contempt. Doe’s sister testified to the fact that, while in her presence, Doe accessed chi…
This is an interesting contrast to the article reported this past week about Nigel Lang, a black man in the UK who was accused of having or sharing child porn because of an extra digit added to an IP address during investigations[1]. One relevant section from the apology/explanation letter: "The issues around the downloading of IIOC [indecent images of children] are that statistically out of a cohort of offenders, th…
> The issues around the downloading of IIOC [indecent images of children] are that statistically out of a cohort of offenders, the predominant characteristic is that the offence will be committed in the main by white males. Only a very small percentage will be black, around 3%, and only around 2% will be female. That's quite a remarkable statistic. I wonder why.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope. If this becomes widespread precedent, encryption is no longer viable in the US.
I think we’re about to see an increase in interest in deniable encryption. A simple solution is to have your encryption software automatically add a large garbage file inside every encrypted volume. When you have something to hide, replace the garbage file with your new encrypted data. This lets you nest your encryption to arbitrary depth, allowing plenty of room for plausible deniability. E.g. you could put your fin…
Maybe it's safer to keep encrypted stuff anonymously in cloud storage. Mr. Rawls could have run his Freenet node on an anonymously-leased VPS, used Tor onion services for the various WebGUIs, and accessed it all via Tails. There would have been nothing local to go after.
and this is why the software you use to encrypt hard drives should support plausible deniability. You give away the (other) password and the decrypted drive contains nothing but cat pictures.
On the third failed try, it should re-encrypt the drive with a random key.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The defendant provided the password to his iphone (that contained highly-unsavory media of his nieces), which contained an unlock code for his laptop (filevault backup decrypt key). He connected the external drives to this laptop, and when he'd transfer media from his laptop to the drives, logging would occur with the file checksums. The hash/checksum is on the laptop with the filepath to the identified external driv…
Wow, that's a lot against this guy, but hypothetically couldn't compelling him to decrypt his drives based on a file hash set a dangerous precedent where police can just plant file hashes somewhere to get access to anyone's drives? Sort of the high tech version of the drug dogs that would signal on cue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The issues around the downloading of IIOC [indecent images of children] are that statistically out of a cohort of offenders, the predominant characteristic is that the offence will be committed in the main by white males. Only a very small percentage will be black, around 3%, and only around 2% will be female. That's quite a remarkable statistic. I wonder why.
Fewer black people for one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not bizarre at all. "To be a witness against himself" is not metaphorical or ye olde English. It literally means what it says--the government can't force someone to testify against himself ( i.e. to provide a confession). If the Founders had meant to say that the government can't compel someone to cooperate in an investigation at all , they would have said that.
Ahh yes, they spell out their interpretation clearly in the companion manual to the constitution.
"To bear arms" doesn't mean to have human arms, after all
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The supreme court is unelected, and are the supreme authority in this nation, above president and congress. the solution is simple - make the supreme court stand up to elections. America has had atrocious decisions from the supreme court. In Dred Scott, they said black people have no rights because they are black. In Roe v Wade, the abortion laws of 47 states were struck down by 5 oligarchs. No matter what you believ…
Checks and balances
Diversity. All systems have failure modes (current fav: utility monsters).
By combining multiple systems, you limit the severity of a failure of any one system. All participating systems must be in a failure mode for the overall systems to be in a failure mode.
If the Supreme Court were elected, it would suffer from basically the same failure modes as other elected offices, and would be able to provide a systemic durability against those failure modes.