231–240 of 284 posts
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Forgetting a password can lead to life in prison. Reasonable.
The judge in this case found that he was able to decrypt the hard drive but chose not to.
More like "the judge thinks". Which, we shouldn't be incarcerating people indefinitely for IMOP.
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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.
The Miranda in your Miranda Rights wasn’t exactly an upstanding citizen either
The practical thing happening here is that the prosecution almost certainly could build a case on the evidence they have, but in practice they don't have to because the judge is willing to hold the guy in jail on procedural grounds.
Again, I'm saying there is a good argument that this was a bad decision and that the All Writs Act shouldn't be construed to allow this. But that's an academic point. In the real world, chances are very near zero that there is any "injustice" going on in this particular case.
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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 dri…
The All Writs Act is a law, and it allows exactly what is happening here. The question at hand is about whether that is in conflict with the fourth and fifth amendments. Equal protection is an entirely different thing and not at issue here.
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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.
The thing with the law and rights is, is that they are the same for everyone. Eroding them for this guy also erodes them for you.
Don't you think its wrong to be able to hold someone forever without evidence? Isn't one of your rights that you don't have to incriminate yourself?
Or do you think that some people should have less or more rights than yourself?
This is just the sort of hard case to set the right precedents about rule of law, you just can't lock someone up without trial. It goes against every know tenet of law.
If there is a rule of law that allows this, then it is basically not rule of law as we understand the word.
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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No, he might have files on the drive which would incriminate him in some other crime. He should not be forced to incriminate himself.
That's exactly what I believe: there are files there that will incriminate him in committing those acts himself. I find it hard to argue he should be left alone, but I suppose that's just a gut reaction?
Probability isn't sufficient, in this philosophy, because it's a trap. Of course probably he has on these drives what prosecutors claim, or worse, evidence of his direct involvement. And the trap is the injection of lack of sympathy into the decision making process; of course any reasonable person will say, eww he's almost certainly a creep therefore I'm not sympathetic to his indefinite incarceration. But that's exactly what the philosophy was supposedly designed to avoid, any possibility that innocent people get jailed; not preventing guilty people going free.
This is why you see a lot of effort by prosecutors defending against introduction of new evidence to prove innocence; because proving innocence well after a guilty verdict, itself shows the possibility of jailing innocents. It taints the system. And then you get these ever more perverse notions that executing those who later prove themselves innocent is not an unconstitutional execution when that person had received a free and fair trial finding them guilty of a capital crime. http://www.businessinsider.com/antonin-scalia-says-executing...
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No because then he gets convicted and sentenced for a definite amount of time. Leave the hard drive encrypted and he's in jail indefinitely.
I mean, he could have testified at the contempt hearing or presented any sort of evidence that he just plain forgot the password, and the court might have heard that. He opted to not testify or introduce any testimony at this hearing. So that court hearing did not seriously consider memory failure because the defendant did not seriously assert it. (Of course if he was lying about the failure of his memory, that asser…
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One reason they want him to unlock the drive is to protect children. Each of these images is a child that has been abused. Some of these are historic cases, and the child is now safe. But some of these are new, and the child is still living with the abuser, and the abuse is continuing.
Isn't that what plea bargaining is for?
Waiting for a case to make its way to court would take far too long. Police will search through seized evidence and immediately start trying to identify the children in the images; working out if the images are new; and working out where the images were created.
They'd also want to see if there are any images of abusers in there too, and if those abusers are already known to police, and if those abusers are the same person as the alleged possessor of images of child sexual abuse currently being detained by police.
Why should this guy get a free pass on child pornography just because he encrypted his hard drive? Child pornography is terrible! Who cares if the guy encrypted his child pornography. He should be in jail either way. The only reason someone would rot in prison for 2 years is because he knows he's going to rot in there for a lot longer due to his child pornography if he unlocks his hard drive.
The point of the 5th ammendment is not that the government shouldn't be able to access concrete evidence. It's so that the government can't torture/imprison someone in order to get them to admit to a crime. The reason for this is that a forced confession isn't any indication that the person actually committed a crime.
Of course we will never know if the guy truly forgot his password, but chances are he's been counseled by his attorney to never give it up.