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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

#201

Post by haikuginger »

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…

> The fact that hey have so much evidence and yet they still prefer to lock him up in jail until he decrypts the drive rather than convict him makes me believe this case is intended to provide jurisprudence in order to force other people to unlock encrypted devices in much more dubious cases.

Or, they prefer to have actual images to use against him in the child porn case they intend to bring, rather than being forced to explain cryptographic hash functions to a jury.

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

#202

Post by eru »

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.

A physical key is equivalent to its shape. So if you have a picture of the key, or just memorise its shape, you can throw away the physical copy.

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

#203

Post by Clubber »

harryh wrote: post #165
Clubber wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Forcing someone to provide evidence is not a 5th amendment violation. Law enforcement can require that a person hand over all sorts of evidence: documents, physical artifacts, even a person's own blood.

Sorry, provide evidence from his mind was probably a better way of saying that.

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

#204

Post by Powerofmene »

ajross wrote: post #185
Powerofmene wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe he is a firm believer that there is no faster way to erode our constitutional protections than to voluntarily surrender them. 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 i…

Maybe. But let's be honest here: there's CP on that drive. This is a good case for spinning around on HN arguing about the extent of the bill of rights protections in the face of creative application of the All Writs Act. It's a terrible one for actually defending the perp. I mean, come on.

>It's a terrible one for actually defending the perp. I mean, come on.

Who is defending him? I cannot in good conscience call him a perp as he has not been charged with, let alone convicted of, a crime. I am only pointing out that there are a myriad of possibilities one of which is that there is child pornography on the drive. However, we do not know that for a fact.

But just as I said, he may fear decrypting the drive because of what is on it (only he knows at this point). He may think it is better to be seen as the little guy being bullied by big brother than to be vilified by those who will presume him guilty of having "CP on that drive" and becoming "the perp" without due process.

Forgive me if I am incorrect but don't our laws apply equally regardless of the crime one is suspected of commiting?

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

#205

Post by kobeya »

DanBC wrote: post #139
kobeya wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that happen? Technically I mean? This isn't full disk encryption? What terrible software leaked the hashes of what it was encrypting? This seems highly relevant to the discussion.

It doesn't happen like that. They know he downloaded files which have the same hash values as known images of child sexual abuse. They arrest him and search him. They can't find these images but they find an encrypted hard drive. In some countries (England) they can ask for the keys, and not handing over the keys is its own offence (with 2 or 5 year sentence depending on the supposed contents). I have no idea what th…

The US has a provision on the bill of rights of its constitution saying, loosely, that you can never be compelled / coerced into being a witness against yourself. E.g. "Admit you did this crime or we send you to jail for life." Keep in mind that the bill of rights was written by rebelling colonials who were explicitly countering what they saw as abuses in the English system of law--in your example the ability of a judge to charge you with essentially the "crime" of not helping the prosecution's case. The crux of this case is over whether revealing a password to unlock a drive is the same as admitting to guilt -- which the court cannot compel you to do. There are arguments for both sides, honestly.

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

#207

Post by kobeya »

fnordsensei wrote: post #146
kobeya wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that happen? Technically I mean? This isn't full disk encryption? What terrible software leaked the hashes of what it was encrypting? This seems highly relevant to the discussion.

It's a misunderstanding. The hashes are of files he's believed to have downloaded, and they want the disks unlocked to see if they're there.

I see. I think this is my understanding of where the hashes come in -- law enforcement doesn't keep child porn around for comparison. That would be asking for abuse. They instead keep a list of cryptographic hashes of identified child porn files, and they want to see if this hard drive, once decrypted, has any files that match those hashes.

Seems easily defeated by a technical adversary, but probably good enough for most police work.

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

#208

Post by usanothanks »

USA is absolutely the worst place to live. You can be putted into jail, just because you forgot your password. You will be taxed worldwide no matter where you live (by the way, there is only one 3rd world country that do this... Guantanamo Bay detention camp... etc. True evil country with millions of slaves.

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

#209

Post by e12e »

slim wrote: post #164
lenkite wrote: post #49

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) ?

They could simply claim that the free space in your hard drive is an encrypted hard partition

Not if it was zeroed out, they couldn't. (Not reasonably, anyway).

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

#210

Post by mcguire »

lenkite wrote: post #49

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) ?

As the note at the bottom of the article implies, "hashes" of files on an encrypted disk? WTF?

"Bleeping Computer users have pointed out that you cannot match file hashes to encrypted content. The article was updated with a link to court documents from where the prosecution's statement was cited."

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