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Australians who won't unlock their phones could face ten years in jail

nakedsecurity.sophos.com

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Re: Australians who won't unlock their phones could face ten years in jail

#121

Post by cryptonector »

stale2002 wrote: post #114
cryptonector wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point, which is that LEO and courts will (reasonably!) make the following inference: "MIGHT be another password-protected partition" -> "is a password-protected partition" You can disagree with that thinking all you want, but it won't do you any good if the people thinking that are in control of your destiny.

Sure, but then nothing you do matters. Imagine the situation where you really ARE innocent. Jail for life? Possible, but whether you are innocent or not doesn't change anything. Yes, the police could just jail you for life or kill you. But that's ALWAYS the case. They'd do that to you anyway of you are innocent

Well, there is something you can do: don't use software that gives you plausible deniability.

BTW, someone posted this fascinating link in this thread: https://web.archive.org/web/20100820175505/http://iq.org:80/...

Re: Australians who won't unlock their phones could face ten years in jail

#122

Post by gknoy »

peeters wrote: post #68
ransom1538 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US: Life sentence. If a judge orders you to unlock your laptop/phone and you don't -- it could be a life sentence. IMHO, they go around the constitution with "Contempt of court". https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/man-jailed-indef...

Granted my source for this is The Newsroom , but IIRC contempt of court is a tool that can only be used coercively, and not punitively. In other words, if you refuse to give your password, you could be detained indefinitely for contempt. But if you forget your password, you should be released immediately. Obviously that's open to interpretation and abuse, I'm just saying contempt would only be correctly applied here…

    refuse to give your password: detained indefinitely
    forget your password: should be released immediately
How could that possibly work? The court has no way of knowing whether someone is refusing to comply, versus being unable to because they don't know (or never knew) a secret. Because of this, it seems very likely that any claim of having forgotten (or having never known) something will be treated as contempt.

Re: Australians who won't unlock their phones could face ten years in jail

#123

Post by skate22 »

squarefoot wrote: post #55

Plausible deniability. The system should allow two (or more) passwords, one unlocks only the important stuff and one unlocks much less dangerous stuff while destroying any evidence of the first, including the multiple passwords protection layer. To add some credibility, the less dangerous data should contain something one could get in trouble for but not enough to have his life destroyed. As an example, if after bein…

Doesnt seem very different than flushing stuff down the toilet when you see the cops pull up to your door with a search warrent

Re: Australians who won't unlock their phones could face ten years in jail

#124

Post by cryptonector »

gambiting wrote: post #118
cryptonector wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not dumb. You installed the thing you're claiming gives you plausible deniability -- it's a fair inference that you wanted just that so that you could hide something, ergo the court will just demand that password. Which means you shouldn't install any such software unless you're going to have those hidden partitions and are willing to let LE have access.

The problem is that you could totally have truecrypt installed and not have a second hidden partition. There is no way to prove that you do. Of course, the court could throw you in jail for not being able to provide something that doesn't exist anyway, but yeah....I'd hope that the lack of proof here would help you win the case.

A prosecutor, a jury, and a judge, will all have a chance to decide that you're telling the truth. There is not mathematical proof here (there never is in any trials, really), so it will all come down to: do we believe the LEO's and the defendant's experts' testimony? Recall, the defendant won't testify -- their lawyer won't let them -- but if they did, they'd probably do themselves in anyways, the court (jury, judge) won't believe them.

There is no plausible deniability here, really.

Re: Australians who won't unlock their phones could face ten years in jail

#125

Post by hsienmaneja »

Arubis wrote: post #50
kazinator wrote: post #46

Don't keep anything sensitive on your phone, encrypted or otherwise. Keep it on some storage medium whose very existence is secret. They can't accuse you of refusing to unlock something whose whereabouts are unknown and, indeed, whose very existence is only alleged.

That's concerning, because it's incredibly easy to feed sensitive and/or valuable data to your phone without it being deliberate. One could argue that that's Google's (and many others') business model. Practically speaking, this is not a long jump to suggesting "don't think any banned thoughts", which obviously gets ugly fast.

Practically, it’s quite a leap from regulating privacy controls of a portable, globally connected node (your phone) to thought control. Just my hypothesis, but while the tech community might recognize the theoretical ideals of a libertarian future, the masses don’t agree. I’d bet that those who actually have something more deeply incriminating to hide comprise a majority (or a significant minority) of those who intend to use surreptitious privacy tools.

It seems that regulating encryption and privacy and agreeing to use regulated devices has parallels to agreeing to a breathalyzer when operating motor vehicle, when implemented correctly. Of course, that ideal implementation has a ways to go.

We will always need to balance privacy with the need to reduce suffering. Libertarian ideals don’t apply universally, given the variety of human behaviors.

Re: Australians who won't unlock their phones could face ten years in jail

#126

Post by strken »

ShorsHammer wrote: post #53
kodablah wrote: post #6

Also concerning is what they are doing towards companies (pardon the tangent): > It covers [...] device vendors [...] as long as they have "a nexus to Australia" > But what if the suspect stores the keys themselves? In that case, the government would pull out the big guns with a second kind of order called a technical capability notice. It forces communications providers to build new capabilities that would help the…

The article mentions both child abusers and terrorists yet the laws will rarely be used for that. Mandatory metadata retention was also bought in for the same reasons and has barely appeared as evidence in any subsequent cases, despite >300,000 warrantless metadata requests last year, overseen by a handful of public servants behind closed doors, in a country of 25 million people. Another very concerning law is about…

Do you have any media coverage on Fiona Wilson from outside Australia? The lack of information makes it very difficult to work out what's going on.

Re: Australians who won't unlock their phones could face ten years in jail

#127

Post by wpdev_63 »

y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #97

It's evident citizens are not going to win the fight for privacy by trying to change policy. Voting has become nearly meaningless in the modern age when it comes to changing politics. Influencing businesses to do what's right is becoming more challenging too as this order shows they can just be forced to hand over data by authorities. I don't want the "bad guys" getting away with their activities either, but I don't…

Voting is meaningful if you are aware of the candidates stances on such policies. If you would like to know more about a US candidate's stance on privacy, internet freedom, etc. then visit _decidethefuture.org_ to see what grade your local representative is getting.

Re: Australians who won't unlock their phones could face ten years in jail

#128

Post by caconym_ »

cryptonector wrote: post #112
caconym_ wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's impossible to prove that you've set up the second password, they can't reasonably demand that you provide it if you deny that it exists. They could un reasonably demand a working second password and incarcerate/torture you until you either provide one or die, but that's the next level.

LEO and courts will (reasonably!) make the following inference: "MIGHT be another password-protected partition" -> "is a password-protected partition"

How does the Truecrypt version of this idea work? I was under the impression that the double-secret data were written in such a way as to be indistinguishable from random bits that normally appear in the files that contain encrypted volumes, with no metadata (e.g. a partition table) to suggest that those random bits are actually interesting.

I figure there is at least one good reason to include amenable "filler" in a "single-secret" file containing encrypted data: it means the size of the plaintext data cannot be inferred from the size of the file. So there is plausible deniability for having amenable "random" data present on that basis alone.

I'm not saying it's easy to extend this scheme to accommodate all environments and/or user experiences. As you say, you can't just e.g. have another partition sitting around full of nothing but suspicious random data.

Re: Australians who won't unlock their phones could face ten years in jail

#129

Post by matheusmoreira »

A government's ability to control its population weakens as subversive technology evolves. The law is always behind the state of the art. This frustrates officials so much they react with incredulity and throw childish tantrums. In order to maintain control, the government must ask for more and more power and become more and more totalitarian. It's like a politico-technological arms race.

What will be the end of this? Will the technology evolve so much the government won't be able to win no matter what it does and surrender? Or are they going to ban encryption, non-vulnerable computers and everything that could stand in the way of prosecuting people they don't like?

Re: Australians who won't unlock their phones could face ten years in jail

#130

Post by mmt »

wpdev_63 wrote: post #127
y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #97

It's evident citizens are not going to win the fight for privacy by trying to change policy. Voting has become nearly meaningless in the modern age when it comes to changing politics. Influencing businesses to do what's right is becoming more challenging too as this order shows they can just be forced to hand over data by authorities. I don't want the "bad guys" getting away with their activities either, but I don't…

Voting is meaningful if you are aware of the candidates stances on such policies. If you would like to know more about a US candidate's stance on privacy, internet freedom, etc. then visit _decidethefuture.org_ to see what grade your local representative is getting.

> Voting is meaningful if you are aware of the candidates stances on such policies.

That's necessary but not sufficient. It's also necessary, in a representative democracy, for a candidate to exist that has a compatible stance on enough (for some definition thereof) policies and few enough incompatible stances.

Arguably, such a candidate must also have a reasonable chance of being elected.

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