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Judge: Americans can be forced to decrypt their laptops

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Re: Judge: Americans can be forced to decrypt their laptops

#171

Post by hobin »

geoffschmidt wrote: post #97

Let's look a little bit further down the road, say 100 or 200 years. If the computer is implanted in my head, can you compel me to give you the data in it? What if the computer is made partly of cells? Just how tightly integrated do I have to be with the storage device before it's part of the private, protected sphere of my personal consciousness? I don't mean to be frivolous. As we become ever more dependent on clou…

I am inclined to think that this is one of those cases where people feel uncomfortable for some time.

...and then they get used to it.

Re: Judge: Americans can be forced to decrypt their laptops

#172

Post by scottdw2 »

Karunamon wrote: post #160
scottdw2 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They savy criminal argument doesn't pass constitutional muster. You could say "allowing criminals to not testify against themselves could frustrate law enforcement because a savy criminal could just commit everything to memory." The 5th ammendment clearly says "too bad, those are the rules."

Except no I couldn't because that's clearly unreasonable. Let's try to avoid any reduction to the absurd, here.

It's not a "reduction to the absurd". It brings up the point that there is no "essential law enforcement" interest that overrides the right to avoid self incrimination. No matter how badly someone wants to convict you, you have a right to not give testimony against your self against your will.

Re: Judge: Americans can be forced to decrypt their laptops

#173

Post by hobin »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #92
jwhitlark wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a leap at all. Many people don't have things like that, either for moral reasons, or there just don't care. Of the four computers I maintain for others, none of them has anything on your list. You can despise the MPAA without downloading movies. Just as you can desire privacy without committing any crimes.

Ever right-click, Save As on an image you didn't have the rights to? Ever copied and pasted an article published by someone else, and saved it to a file? During your online conversations, have you ever written something negative about another person? Do you have any data that you are contractually obligated to keep a secret, possibly relating to agreements signed with employers or clients? Note that even data in your…

None of the things you mentioned are, in themselves, illegal.

Saving an image or an article to your hard drive is not illegal, but redistributing it can be. Writing negative stories about other people is (in practically all cases) not illegal, either. Nor is having secret information.

Unless the majority secretly has an ungodly amount of child porn in their web cache I don't know about, I am not very inclined to believe that everyone is a criminal under a microscope.

Re: Judge: Americans can be forced to decrypt their laptops

#174

Post by Nick_C »

techtalsky wrote: post #76
chimeracoder wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to do that - there's a decent argument to be made that forcing you to decrypt a drive is already forcing you to testify against yourself, in violation of the 5th Amendment.

Right, and that's what the article says a judge decided is NOT the case.

No he hasn't. Pls read the article. They are requiring her to provide the documents.

Re: Judge: Americans can be forced to decrypt their laptops

#175

Post by hobin »

ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #31
Simucal wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what the courts would say when told that it is possible to have a hidden inner volume that is impossible to detect and when I hand over my key it may just be the outer containers, not the hidden inner container that I have unlocked.

The best way to hide something is with misdirection and dead ends. It's by letting someone win a little but not all the way. If you're a straight male just make a second inner hidden volume and put a ton of gay porn on it. After a few days of arguing with the court just reveal your password to it and they'll think "oh shit, this is what he was hiding. Well nothing to see here, moving on. That's all."

>.>

...I always use that method when trying to get out of trouble. Shhh.

Re: Judge: Americans can be forced to decrypt their laptops

#176

Post by scottdw2 »

steelaz wrote: post #153
scottdw2 wrote: post #58

You can be compelled to produce a physical key to a safe. However what if the contents of the safe are paper with text written in an invented language, known only to you? Can you be compelled to translate them for the court? What if they just contained numbers? Could you be forced to explain what the numbers mean? I would conclude that such an action would violate the 5th ammendment. Forcing her to decrypt the hard d…

Comment taken from Reddit: Actually if you read the ruling, it states that they have a recording of a conversation, transcribed in the ruling, where she basically admits what they are looking for is on the laptop. They then use existing Vermont case law where some perv had child porn on his laptop that an officer and ICE agent witnessed before getting locked out of the laptop. The case law the judge quotes says "wher…

The laptop does not "contain" what they are looking for. It contains gibberish.

If they had her on tape saying "the evidence is in my house" and then they searched her house and didn't find anything, could they force her to tell them where the evidence was?

No.

Any position based on an analog to a vault, is ignorant of the facts. Encrypted data is not locked in anything. It's scrambled.

Here's another analogue:

A locked safe on your portch carries an expectation of privacy. It can't be opened by the police without a warrant. A dropped disk in plain site on your steps does not. The police could copy the disk, break its encryption and use the data as evidence against you.

Why? Because encrypted data isn't "locked", it's scrambled. If a credible expert can unscramble it, then reading it was not a "search". It's equivalent to reading a paper taken from your garbage.

The tape recording of her changes nothing about the facts of what the contes of the drive are (gibberish), nor what the nature of decryption is (testimony). Any judicial holdings to the contrary are erroneous violations of the constitution and should be vacated.

Re: Judge: Americans can be forced to decrypt their laptops

#177

Post by pyre »

asd344335345 wrote: post #161
o2sd wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> TrueCrypt's deniability was broken in 2008. Citation? >> I'm not sure if they fixed it since then. Maybe you could find out and post something useful.

"In a paper published in 2008 and focused on the then latest version (v5.1a) and its plausible deniability, a team of security researchers led by Bruce Schneier states that Windows Vista, Microsoft Word, Google Desktop, and others store information on unencrypted disks, which might compromise TrueCrypt's plausible deniability. The study suggested the addition of a hidden operating system functionality; this feature w…

It clearly states that it did not evaluate the security plausible deniability of the 'hidden OS' feature.

This is basically saying that if you mount a hidden partition, you may leak information via things like browser cache that ends up getting saved to unencrypted areas. On the other hand, this says nothing about the case where you have the full drive encrypted and boot a different OS if you mount the hidden partition via the bootloader.

Re: Judge: Americans can be forced to decrypt their laptops

#178

Post by burgerbrain »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #165
burgerbrain wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Or should the police never be allowed in your house under any circumstance?" The only circumstance is with my consent. Unfortunately I cannot prevent physical intrusions. When it comes to security of data however thankfully things have been improving.

Sometimes the police might need to enter someones property or get access to data to stop crime. Whilst I think that of course people should stand up for civil liberties etc we have to bear in mind if we completely neutered the police your civil liberties aren't worth shit as a criminal can just take them from you as nobody has enough power to gather evidence against them. You then risk people turning to mob justice w…

In a world where I have an absolute defence against the invasion of police officers, I also have protection against criminals. The "real world" version of cryptography does not of course exist, but nevertheless I subscribe to the belief that all transactions should be voluntary.

Police can serve warrants to search my home. There is nothing I can do to stop them, and I won't attempt to stop them (since I value my life). However that does not mean I consent or approve. "They have a warrant", provides me with zero comfort.

tl;dr: Police are going to keep being police without my approval, so I don't see why my system of ethics needs to give them room to operate.

Re: Judge: Americans can be forced to decrypt their laptops

#179

Post by andylei »

burgerbrain wrote: post #124
andylei wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do people here honestly believe that its not okay for cops with warrants to search someone's encrypted hard drive because they might find something that's not illegal?

It is never okay for my privacy to be compromised. I don't care if they have a piece of paper that says that I'm not supposed to care. This has nothing to do with things that may or may not be "illegal".

this an absolutely ridiculous position. if you are charged with a crime, police absolutely do and should investigate for evidence, which includes breaching your privacy. the entire of idea of finding evidence is to breach your privacy.

without this, almost no crimes would have enough evidence to go to prosecution. that includes stuff that you don't care about, like privacy, and maybe stuff you do care about, like murders and kidnapping

Re: Judge: Americans can be forced to decrypt their laptops

#180

Post by Karunamon »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #163
pyre wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does preventing the filesystem from writing timestamps solve anything? We're talking about the 'boring partition' having timestamps that suggest that you haven't used it in months (i.e. really old timestamps), when there is probably evidence elsewhere that you have used it (e.g. emails that you've sent since those timestamps).

just write false timestamps to the FS saying it was used more recently?

Or scramble them altogether. Every write to the filesystem through Truecrypt's driver results in a completely random (but still valid) ctime/atime for that file.

I can't readily think of any Windows processes this would break.

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