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The way I understand it, I have plausible deniability that I have any encrypted data on this disk. Failing that, wouldn't being forced to divulge which of the partitions are actual encrypted volumes be self-incrimination?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you don't see in the news is the zillions of times a day the system protects peoples' rights through criminal appeals, etc, and the massive overhead that arises from actual criminals abusing those protections in order to try and get out on technicalities. My friends who have clerked for judges talk about how frustrating it is to deal with appeal after appeal from people who are clearly guilty and just abusing th…
> What you don't see in the news is the zillions of times a day the system protects peoples' rights through criminal appeals, etc, and the massive overhead that arises from actual criminals abusing those protections in order to try and get out on technicalities. Good. Better criminals abuse the system than the system abuse people. > My friends who have clerked for judges talk about how frustrating it is to deal with…
That's a trope. In reality, the justice system is about striking a balance between the need to preserve order and security and the need to protect peoples' rights. That's why the Constitution uses "balance-y" words like "reasonable" when talking about 4th amendment rights.
> I don't trust your friends view of clearly guilty, sounds like bias to me.
I'm sorry to break it to you, but most people the police catch are "clearly guilty." Even my PD friends acknowledge that most of their clients are "clearly guilty" (they see their jobs as more watching out for the ones that aren't and making sure the ones that are get at least a proportionate punishment). The media likes to cover edge cases, but for every one of those, there are a dozens of people who rob a liquor store and leave video evidence of themselves doing it.
It is interesting to note that even most of the cases that are central to defining 4th amendment rights, ones where judges have come down in favor of the defendant, are nonetheless ones where the defendant did actually commit the crime he was accused of committing. Ernesto Miranda was convicted the second time around, for rape, even with his confession excluded, served time, and was ultimately killed in a bar fight.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you don't see in the news is the zillions of times a day the system protects peoples' rights through criminal appeals, etc, and the massive overhead that arises from actual criminals abusing those protections in order to try and get out on technicalities. My friends who have clerked for judges talk about how frustrating it is to deal with appeal after appeal from people who are clearly guilty and just abusing th…
Isn't the case in the story also one of "technicalities," since the police seem reasonably sure the material is on one of the drives, just not exactly which one? People who clerk have a skewed view of the judicial system compared to someone who has been convicted.
No they don't, just a different one. Read a lot of appeals and it's obvious that a lot of the arguments are completely, utterly bogus. There are technicalities that are unfair to people who are appealing, like having appeals rejected for failure to timely file when the appellant didn't have access to admissible evidence in time to file, and so forth. Those are the kind of cases that tend to work their way up through en banc review and onto the SC eventually.
But a lot of other appeals are so ridiculous as to be desperate or amount to judicial trolling. The fact is that some prisoners have nothing better to do than file appeals to make the time go by faster.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you don't see in the news is the zillions of times a day the system protects peoples' rights through criminal appeals, etc, and the massive overhead that arises from actual criminals abusing those protections in order to try and get out on technicalities. My friends who have clerked for judges talk about how frustrating it is to deal with appeal after appeal from people who are clearly guilty and just abusing th…
Isn't the case in the story also one of "technicalities," since the police seem reasonably sure the material is on one of the drives, just not exactly which one? People who clerk have a skewed view of the judicial system compared to someone who has been convicted.
I'd argue it's a much less biased view that incorporates more and better information.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem from the stigma point of view is that, even if our better judgement is saying "stand up for your privacy rights, even if you have nothing to hide", our (or at least my) brain is also saying "if he was innocent he wouldn't have a problem un-encrypting the drive(s) for them". That's in my head, despite the fact that I am well aware that he could be taking a moral stand, or he could have stuff on those drive…
The stigma comes from an attitude that the judicial system's responsibility is to produce convictions, so it appears that defendants who are not convicted are merely certainly-guilty people against whom the prosecution didn't have the tools necessary to convict. Down this path lies lowered standards for due process and evidence and a higher incidence of false positives.
No, that's the responsibility of prosecutors. Trial courts are 'finders of fact,' whether or not those facts suit the prosecution.
This is one of those issues that leaves you arguing with yourself ... I'm 100% against child pornography (or really the exploitation of anyone), but 100% for rights to privacy, both digitally and in "in real life". We can only hope that if this suspect is guilty, they find evidence that can be obtained without violating his rights ... and of course if he's innocent, I hope he avoids the stigma being a suspect might b…
You can be compelled to testify under oath for many reasons none of which involve doing anything wrong. When you testify under oath, you must answer the questions asked truthfully or face unlimited jail-time for contempt.
The fifth amendment is the only form of protection you have from being called to testify and being grilled about any random topic. It's a balance to the otherwise tremendous power that a court has.
The prosecution must be able to make their case without the defendants assistance. This is a fundamental aspect of our legal system.
I wonder why people place themselves in a position where it's possible for them to decrypt the drives under coercion. If I wanted to secure something and I thought that I might be under coercion at any point, then I'd stick part of my key files on a system that would delete them if it didn't get the all clear, and have another part that I could destroy in an off hand manner - maybe by smashing a USB key with a hammer…
Question- I had a idea about how to make this type of punishment non feasible. Replace the standard truecrypt bootloader with one of a design that has a 'self destruct' What I mean by that is, when you turn on your computer and the boot loader is initialized it actually deletes its keyfile from disk and only keeps it in ram. If you dont enter the correct password in xxx minutes or if you restart the computer, that da…
Say, for the sake of argument, that I have an external SSD with 5 partitions, 2 of which are filled with random data (passing a chi-square test), the remaining 3 are TrueCrypt volumes. The way I understand it, I have plausible deniability that I have any encrypted data on this disk. Failing that, wouldn't being forced to divulge which of the partitions are actual encrypted volumes be self-incrimination?