171–180 of 284 posts
So the police no longer need to plant drugs. They can just plant encrypted hard drives to which you have 'forgotten' the password. Hard-drives containing hashes of 'bad' pics. And then you can spend your life in jail (unless you plead guilty) ?
When the FBI used the All Writs Act against Apple to attempt to force Apple to bypass the password functions of an iPhone or develop a backdoor method of access, the courts ruled that decryption was not a violation of the Fifth Amendment "if the contents were a foregone conclusion." So if "foregone conclusion" is the criteria that must be met, I have to ask how the contents of this man's external hard drive could be…
> What if he no longer possess them? He could have deleted them. If that's the case he should give the FBI the key. That way he'll prove he wasn't possessing child pornography.
Or maybe he believes that damn pesky constitution (sarcasm) applies to everyone including the government when it comes to search and seizure, and to himself when it comes to right to due process of law, and the protection against self incrimination to name just a few.
Or maybe there is child pornography on there and he does not want to charged and tried and vilified in the court of public opinion. Right now he can stand on "higher ground" by making a constitutional law argument than exposing a secret that he may be ashamed of (guessing here).
Or maybe he truly does not know the password? Despite the governments best efforts they have not been able to crack it so it must be quite secure/complicated.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So much for that whole constitution thing anyway.. They can just create some "act" that overrides it! And nobody will complain because the person affected is the bad guy, until they come for them.
But they are not asking him to testify, admit guilt, or anything like that. They aren't even asking him to tell them the password, just to enter the password to decrypt. This is more like expecting access to your house when a search warrant is provided. EDIT: To be clear, it's not that I feel he should necessarily be compelled, but rather that a fifth amendment defense is weak in this case, since it's not a testimony…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't override the Constitution, though. He's not compelled to testify against himself. In a pre-computer society, we'd understand the Fifth Amendment as allowing you not to testify to your crimes, but not allowing you to refuse the police the right to search your house with a court-signed warrant, simply because you keep incriminating things in the house. It might exploit a loophole, though (and I also think th…
> The one thing that's different with computers is that usually the police can just break into your house (or a safe, or something like that) if you refuse to give them the key, and encrypted drives have no other alternate route in. So you wouldn't be kept in prison indefinitely for refusing to comply with a warrant; you'd just get your door knocked down. This isn't really new with computers. People have been writing…
I'm guessing that they would have brute-forced it. The complexity is much lower than the modern case as is the number of potential keys. I can imagine someone spending a fair bit of time in jail for contempt during this procedure, but it would not be indefinite. I can also just see the police calling in a code breaker and not bothering with the court order to tell them the key.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But they are not asking him to testify, admit guilt, or anything like that. They aren't even asking him to tell them the password, just to enter the password to decrypt. This is more like expecting access to your house when a search warrant is provided. EDIT: To be clear, it's not that I feel he should necessarily be compelled, but rather that a fifth amendment defense is weak in this case, since it's not a testimony…
> They aren't even asking him to tell them the password, just to enter the password to decrypt. How are you distinguishing one from the other? What makes compelling someone to speak the password aloud different from compelling them to type it with a keyboard?
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/01/court-rules-agai...
EDIT: Worth pointing out that line in that case is really "physical evidence" vs. "knowledge". The court argues that the fingerprint unlocking the smartphone is closer to a blood sample than a testimony. However, I could definitely see a court seeing this as "it's ok to make someone unlock" because they didn't just collect the physical evidence, but made him take the action of unlocking the phone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 case…
Similarly, the cases where wide-net surveillance has had a detrimental effect on people-- the case of the Stanford student who accidentally got added to the U.S.'s no-fly list comes to mind-- there was probably nothing at all the person could have done to prevent getting screwed.