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DOJ: We can force you to decrypt that laptop

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Re: DOJ: We can force you to decrypt that laptop

#101

Post by VladRussian »

djackson wrote: post #98
SoftwareMaven wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you are failing to understand the 5th Amendment. You do not have to give up that information, if it is only in your head, regardless of the subpoena. That is the entire point of the 5th. You can't stop the government from doing its search, you can't actively hide it, but you don't have to give them the information if it will incriminate you.

They have the information. They have your hard drive. You have a key, or they can brute force the information out with decryption software. This is not a Fifth Amendment case. They don't want or care about the password itself. They can't use the information you provide (the password) to incriminate you, no matter what the password is.

>You have a key, or they can brute force the information out with decryption software. This is not a Fifth Amendment case. They don't want or care about the password itself. They can't use the information you provide (the password) to incriminate you, no matter what the password is.

You have the coordinates of the dead body, or they can dig and scan each square foot of the continent. This is not a Fifth Amendment case. They don't want or care about the coordinates itself. They can't use the information you provide (the coordinates of the dead body) to incriminate you, no matter what the coordinates of the dead body is.

Re: DOJ: We can force you to decrypt that laptop

#102

Post by mckoss »

The DOJ claims that allowing defendants to exercise their 5th amendment rights against self-incrimination would "make their prosecution impossible."

To which I say:

1. Your prosecutors are lazy and want to force criminals to prosecute themselves.

2. If the only external evidence of a crime is a private file on a hard drive, it seems to me that not much harm was done to society and we should leave these people alone.

Re: DOJ: We can force you to decrypt that laptop

#103

Post by jancona »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #71
djackson wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you understand what a subpoena is. A subpoena is a compulsory order to produce all documents related to a matter, whether the government knows they exist or not. So yes, if you believe in subpoena power, you agree that you should have to produce that box.

And you are failing to understand the 5th Amendment. You do not have to give up that information, if it is only in your head, regardless of the subpoena. That is the entire point of the 5th. You can't stop the government from doing its search, you can't actively hide it, but you don't have to give them the information if it will incriminate you.

And you are failing to understand the legal questions at issue...

The Fifth Amendment, as currently interpreted, doesn't provide the protection you describe. It protects against giving self-incriminating testimony and essentially the question is whether the password is "testimony." Keep in mind that the government is not asking him to disclose it, just to type it into the computer. Here's a good discussion: http://volokh.com/posts/chain_1197670606.shtml (There seems to be a CSS problem with that page, but the text is fine.)

Re: DOJ: We can force you to decrypt that laptop

#104

Post by themenace »

jarin wrote: post #34
Shenglong wrote: post #30

Prosecutors stressed that they don't actually require the passphrase itself, meaning Fricosu would be permitted to type it in and unlock the files without anyone looking over her shoulder. I wonder if anyone has thought of using more than one keys as a decryption possibility. I've always considered it, but never figured there'd be too much use. Say, have one correct key to decrypts data stored in one way, and another…

Truecrypt has supported that kind of plausible deniability for a while.

And there is a system called Deniable Video extends that concept of plausible deniability to live audio & video. It's like TrueCrypt for real-time data.

Re: DOJ: We can force you to decrypt that laptop

#105

Post by llambda »

DavidSJ wrote: post #13
roc wrote: post #5

The truly interesting bit, will be when a case of (real or alleged) multiple hidden encrypted volumes is publicized. If the government feels the information they want is on a laptop, the laptop's owner would suddenly find themselves forced to prove a negative (there are no more hidden volumes), lest they be held in contempt. If they can seemingly compel you to reveal something they can't proven even exists and lock y…

US v Hubbell makes clear that the government cannot compel production of documents (except under immunity to prosecution) which it does not know, ahead of time, to exist.

So what if the govt suggests a document exists (claims to know exists) and therefore could be located on an encrypted volume is that grounds for them to force someone to decrypt that volume or be held in contempt of court?

Re: DOJ: We can force you to decrypt that laptop

#106

Post by Estragon »

VladRussian wrote: post #82
bhousel wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every case is a little different, but investigators do need probable cause to search a laptop. This is a mortgage fraud case involving years of criminal activity, so I'm guessing that it's probably not too hard for the prosecution to produce witnesses who can say "yes, she sold me that crappy mortgage and used her laptop when I went to meet with her.", or direct information of her internet usage (ISP, or logs from ca…

the DOJ have laptop (like a knife in a murder case). According to Miranda, the defendant have the right to remain silent (incl. all kinds of communications, ie. oral, keyboard typing, Morse alphabet using campfire smoke, etc... ) and, in particular, can't be compelled into communicating any information in connection with her/his using of the laptop (or murder knife), while the DOJ is free to have as much witnesses as…

Miranda doesn't apply, here. That derives from the 5th amendment, but it pertains to police interviews after arrest. The ability to obviate the 5th amendment by offering immunity amounts to a way to compel potentially incriminating testimony. It's likely that eventually the question here is going to be the extent of the immunity required to compel testimony of the password: just immunity for information contained in the password itself, or for information contained in the files it unlocks?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_warning

Re: DOJ: We can force you to decrypt that laptop

#107

Post by [deleted] »

marshray wrote: post #77
palish wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the moral of the story is, conduct your criminal activity via software running on an external server on a TrueCrypt partiton, and always interface with it via Tor? Then they can't prove it's "your server" and thus order you to reveal the key. (For example, if you have access to a credit card not in your name, you can set up an EC2 micro instance for free for a year. Then install TeueCrypt and be on your merry crim…

The DoJ would simply get a judge to sign an order giving their forensics lab a snapshot of the virtual machine with the key sitting decrypted in RAM. Amazon would be under a gag order not to tell you that they even had it (not that Amazon would even care to tell you anyway). If they wanted to pin it to you, they could easily show timing correlations between your client system activity and the VM activity. Probably th…

[deleted]

Re: DOJ: We can force you to decrypt that laptop

#108

Post by asciilifeform »

marshray wrote: post #92
asciilifeform wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and yes. Use general-purpose computer parts, with some imagination. One simple example: Modify the power pins (in a USB keychain drive and a dedicated USB socket, naturally ) such that +5v and ground are connected backwards. Connect a diode in such a way that should the stick ever be plugged into an ordinary USB socket, power is applied to a small piece of nichrome igniter wire (model rocket store, or cannibaliz…

OMG. With that much knowledge and creativity clearly you must be a terrorist. Or someone who grew up way back when the official US government policy was that kids should learn hands-on Science and Math. In any case, you do something like that today you will frighten the living daylights out of enough technically-illiterate-but-powerful people that you will not get out of jail for a long long time, regardless of wheth…

Put it together correctly, and there will be no visible pyrotechnics. Just a USB stick which mysteriously fails to mount. AFAIK, most police agencies will not attempt chip-level data forensics, and perhaps no one will take the trouble to pry the stick open.

Know that any serious electronics tinkerer could come up with many tricks far more clever than this one.

And once again, one ought to compare the sentence for evidence destruction to that which your original crimes carry.

Re: DOJ: We can force you to decrypt that laptop

#109

Post by cfaubell »

chrisjsmith wrote: post #36
lotharbot wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any reason you linked to a third-party site instead of xkcd itself? http://xkcd.com/538/ (easily googled -- xkcd crypto, first hit.)

Oh pedant, I thoroughly apologise for my ignorance. May my vegetables all die, my breath smell for eternity and my armpits flood with hair and engulf the earth.

It's not pedantry. Linking directly to the content's author makes sure that he is properly credited and gets the exposure.

Re: DOJ: We can force you to decrypt that laptop

#110

Post by Canada »

mckoss wrote: post #102

The DOJ claims that allowing defendants to exercise their 5th amendment rights against self-incrimination would "make their prosecution impossible." To which I say: 1. Your prosecutors are lazy and want to force criminals to prosecute themselves. 2. If the only external evidence of a crime is a private file on a hard drive, it seems to me that not much harm was done to society and we should leave these people alone.

#2 is the best point.

It's worth it to trade letting some guilty people get away with it in order to have the freedom of conscience to write whatever we like in our computers and not be compelled to turn over our private writings.

If something bad was done to someone else, there's going to be evidence of it elsewhere: Contracts must be held by some other party, bank records, etc.

Is the prosecutor trying to claim the government needs access to the accused computer to convict her of a commercial crime? Are there no third parties involved who are in possession of useful records? No banks were involved in this mortgage fraud? Really???

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