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Man Who Refused to Decrypt Hard Drives Still in Prison After Two Years

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Re: Man Who Refused to Decrypt Hard Drives Still in Prison After Two Years

#91

Post by rayiner »

Clubber wrote: post #78
jo909 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a reasonable analogy too, but that does not help (me at least) to understand the position of the judge and prosecution. Deciphering the letter would mean he writes down the cleartext version, or reads it out aloud or something like that, which could much more obviously be argued as "being witness against himself". Their position is that this is exactly NOT what they are trying to force him to do, so the fifth…

I agree. When we think of it as a cyphered letter, it is more clear to me that the government is compelling him to incriminate himself. So instead of collecting evidence, they are forcing him to provide evidence, which to me is a clear 5th amendment violation. When we use the safe analogy, well safes are easy to open, no big deal. The government opens them all the time. Why is that such a huge leap? Using the incorre…

Your analogy fails for a couple of reasons:

1) Giving up the decryption key is clearly not analogous to deciphering the letter. When you decrypt a drive, it’s the computer does the actual deciphering operation.

2) Focusing on how easy the safe is to break without the key cuts against your position. We can jail people for not providing the key to a regular safe, even though the cops could break into it. But we can’t jail people for not providing the key to an encrypted drive, even though the cops likely have no other way to get the evidence they know is in there. Isn’t that precisely backward? Shouldn’t the cops have more power in the situation where they have no alternatives?

Re: Man Who Refused to Decrypt Hard Drives Still in Prison After Two Years

#92

Post by 1_2__4 »

jo909 wrote: post #62
geofft wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The fact remains that the government has not brought charges," Donoghue said in a telephone interview. "Our client has now been in custody for almost 18 months based on his assertion of his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination." To be clear (and I am pretty sure the public defender knows this, but is just phrasing it like this for public perception), the prosecution's position is that the Fif…

My analogy would be that 1. There is an unbreakable safe 2. The judge believes he has the key to the unbreakable safe 3. They know there is evidence inside the safe 4. They ask him to unlock the safe 5. He refuses to do so, so they try to force him by jailing him They do not ask him to testify about the safes contents or even to hand over the key, just to "insert and turn the key". And their argument is that he can n…

The fact that he possesses no physical key is the crux of the matter. Any metaphor that tries to use objects like keys is pointless - there would be no controversy if there was a physical key.

Re: Man Who Refused to Decrypt Hard Drives Still in Prison After Two Years

#93

Post by gtirloni »

JorgeGT wrote: post #61
jancsika wrote: post #29

There's a better article in Ars: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/man-jailed-indef... From that article: > The court also noted that the authorities "found [on the Mac Book Pro] one image depicting a pubescent girl in a sexually suggestive position and logs that suggested the user had visited groups with titles common in child exploitation." They also said the man's sister had "reported" that her brother s…

> The court also noted that the authorities "found [on the Mac Book Pro] one image depicting a pubescent girl in a sexually suggestive position and logs that suggested the user had visited groups with titles common in child exploitation." They also said the man's sister had "reported" that her brother showed her hundreds of pictures and videos of child pornography. The fact that hey have so much evidence and yet they…

These issues are often around catching criminals but there's always the issue that they will be abused for something else and we (the common folks) are all at risk. That's plausible.

Honest question: It's hard to do risk assessment at my level of ignorance so where can I find major cases where common people have been screwed by the overarching tentacles of govt surveillance in the developed world? Any noteworthy cases I should read about to raise my level of alertness?

Re: Man Who Refused to Decrypt Hard Drives Still in Prison After Two Years

#94

Post by foldr »

weinzierl wrote: post #82
chatmasta wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right... so for the authorities to "compare" the hash of an encrypted file with that of a known original, they would need to encrypt the original with the same private key used to encrypt the encrypted file. If they had that private key, wouldn't it be sufficient to unlock the drive? They wouldn't need his cooperation to decrypt the drive if they had a private key. So it seems like a catch-22 compelling him to decryp…

Exactly, but the original quote doesn't say that they compared decrypted content with known hashes. It doesn't say anything about how they learned about the "content stored on the encrypted hard drive". "Investigators said content stored on the encrypted hard drive matched file hashes for known child pornography content." I read it like this: They figured out that the disk had some incriminating files, as I described…

If they're in possession of the original files they can just look at the files to see what they contain.

Re: Man Who Refused to Decrypt Hard Drives Still in Prison After Two Years

#95

Post by lafay »

ja27 wrote: post #33
xtanx wrote: post #11

"Investigators said content stored on the encrypted hard drive matched file hashes for known child pornography content." If the disk is encrypted how can they match file hashes? Do they encrypt known CP files with the FileVault key and then compare? If so, isn't that enough to convict him?

My understanding is that they know the file hashes and path they were written to from logs of the tool he used to download them.

Yes, this. Whatever was used to share or transfer the files generated a cleartext log with MD5 hashes, which was written somewhere other than the encrypted volume.

Re: Man Who Refused to Decrypt Hard Drives Still in Prison After Two Years

#96

Post by heartbreak »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #63
libeclipse wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone with half a brain wouldn't trust anything they get back from a third party.

We're talking about someone who openly shared his illegal porn habits with a family member. I don't think we're looking at a Mensa champion.

We're talking about someone who allegedly shared his illegal porn habits. Hasn't been convicted yet.

Re: Man Who Refused to Decrypt Hard Drives Still in Prison After Two Years

#97

Post by campuscodi »

xtanx wrote: post #11

"Investigators said content stored on the encrypted hard drive matched file hashes for known child pornography content." If the disk is encrypted how can they match file hashes? Do they encrypt known CP files with the FileVault key and then compare? If so, isn't that enough to convict him?

Article was updated with the following link to sustain the source of the information: https://arstechnica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/rawlsopin...

Re: Man Who Refused to Decrypt Hard Drives Still in Prison After Two Years

#98

Post by jo909 »

1_2__4 wrote: post #92
jo909 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My analogy would be that 1. There is an unbreakable safe 2. The judge believes he has the key to the unbreakable safe 3. They know there is evidence inside the safe 4. They ask him to unlock the safe 5. He refuses to do so, so they try to force him by jailing him They do not ask him to testify about the safes contents or even to hand over the key, just to "insert and turn the key". And their argument is that he can n…

The fact that he possesses no physical key is the crux of the matter. Any metaphor that tries to use objects like keys is pointless - there would be no controversy if there was a physical key.

Well there are plenty of safes without physical keys that use pin-pads. To to bring that analogy a little closer to reality then, they are trying to force him to enter the pin into the safe.

And again the current argument is not about whether he knows the pin or not, just whether he can refuse to enter it by arguing that this would be "being witness against himself", i.e. protected by the fifth.

Re: Man Who Refused to Decrypt Hard Drives Still in Prison After Two Years

#99

Post by wyager »

Neverbolt wrote: post #32
stephengillie wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something doesn't add up in this story. Encryption and hashing are different processes with different algorithms - SHA vs MD5. For example, IPSec VPNs hash a packet with MD5 to prevent tampering, then encrypt the hash with SHA256 to prevent viewing. (Because the message could be modified while encrypted, were it not also hashed.) Isn't the point of encryption that it doesn't create a reliable hash - that 2 identical…

There are several misconceptions in this comment, first and foremost that SHA is encryption, which it is not. It is a hashing algorithm, not unlike MD5, though "stronger". Secondly, when you have two files that are exactly the same and encrypt both with the same key, method and parameters then both will have the same hash. ( Though I could imagine Apple doing stuff with padding, and other parameters to make this not…

All modern encryption schemes inject randomness into the encryption process (via an initialization vector) so no, there is no way to check if two encrypted files are the same file. The investigators' claim doesn't make sense.

Re: Man Who Refused to Decrypt Hard Drives Still in Prison After Two Years

#100

Post by rayiner »

geofft wrote: post #40
jancsika wrote: post #29

There's a better article in Ars: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/man-jailed-indef... From that article: > The court also noted that the authorities "found [on the Mac Book Pro] one image depicting a pubescent girl in a sexually suggestive position and logs that suggested the user had visited groups with titles common in child exploitation." They also said the man's sister had "reported" that her brother s…

> "The fact remains that the government has not brought charges," Donoghue said in a telephone interview. "Our client has now been in custody for almost 18 months based on his assertion of his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination." To be clear (and I am pretty sure the public defender knows this, but is just phrasing it like this for public perception), the prosecution's position is that the Fif…

Not quite. The prosecution’s position is that the 5th Amendment doesn’t apply here, which makes all the All Writs stuff permissible: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201....

The Third Circuit punted in the legal question, stating that even if the 5th Amendment applied to being forced to hand over a decryption key, the guy couldn’t invoke his Fifth Amendment right here because of legal technicalities (see Kerr’s analysis in the link above).

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