151–160 of 160 posts
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How do you get into digital forensics dev? Seems like an interesting field.
I was laid off from a startup at the bitter, wretched end of the dotcom bust in the spring of 2003. Another company two blocks from my apartment in Pasadena, CA was hiring C++ engineers, and I was lucky enough to join Guidance Software to work on EnCase. It's a fun field: bits and bytes, a whole lot of 'em, and the requirement for perfection.
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> Well, not if you're physically located in in the U.S. at the tome, but the GDPR effects non-EU businesses and governments as long as the person involved is an EU citizen. In what court would you bring a case against the United States under the GDPR?
If the business operates with the EU, this generally involves having a subsidiary in an EU country (most companies have subsidiaries in Ireland that own all of their "IP" for tax avoidance reasons, and thus can be very trivially fined as they operate as an EU company). I get your point, but practically most large companies have EU subsidiaries (and in many cases, structure their businesses to exploit the benefits of…
> but the GDPR effects non-EU businesses and governments
specifically.
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Further down the wikipedia page there’s a link to moxie marlinspike saying warrant canaries don’t work because not updating them is legally the same as disclosing you’ve received a secret warrant. In other words, you have to lie in your canary or violate the warrant.
Has that been tested at the appellate level? The government can compel silence (gag orders,) but the government can’t compel speech, which is what updating a warrant canary is. This seems to be ready made for the Supreme Court.
If someone just so happens to ask me on Twitter each day if I received an order, and I say no, but on day 99 I don't reply or say "I'd rather not answer", does that muddy the waters a little?
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I think it's a bit strong to conclude that if a judge disagrees with you on this topic it is activism. This is relatively untested/uncharted legal territory and, at least in the US, it is complex. For places like Australia that have no guaranteed first amendment rights, I would agree that it is much more cut and dry because there are other laws already in place that can limit your speech through due process. The same…
Thank you for this post. People seem to be treating warrant canaries as a sort of “gotcha!” defense that no judge would take seriously, but you’ve given a good explanation of why it’s not.
I agree there are several theoretical reasons why warrant canaries might actually be a useful tool, but it's just as likely that intentionally constructing a scenario where you are implicitly telling people about a gag order through a bunch of hurdles would not be considered following the spirit of the law.
For instance, if you get an NSL you can't tell your family about it. When going to see your lawyer, you need to omit the reason why you're seeing a lawyer -- which is basically de-facto requiring you to actively lie to your family (because "I can't tell you why I'm seeing my lawyer" is arguably code for "I have received an NSL" if your family is aware that you might get an NSL one day).
I personally think this is massively unjust (and in Australia, we have explicit laws to disallow speaking about the existence or non-existence of any such secret warrants -- which makes even attempting to set up a warrant canary a crime with a minimum 2 year sentence).
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Wouldn't this mean that measures to protect your data from other adversaries (criminals or competitors) would be illegal as well? Unless, of course, "intent" is determined solely by the fact that I am or am not a criminal. But in an age of overcriminalization, where you can indict a ham sandwich if you need to, anyone could be considered a criminal if the government takes enough of an interest in your activities. Thi…
The question is - have you, realising that you are under police investigation, attempted to destroy information which that investigation is interested in. Not "Do you have a lock on your phone" or even "Do you have a lock on your phone which causes it to self-wipe after 5 incorrect password attempts" but "Did you, when you realised the police were on to you, deliberately wipe some data to stop you getting into troubl…
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Too big to spoil banks? You don’t really need to look very far. The moment you have so many people that you can plausibly chalk the deletion up to miscommunication or automated processes you are basically home free. Or at least, just get off with a fine, it’s the company doing a wrong after all, and you can’t jail a company.
> The moment you have so many people that you can plausibly chalk the deletion up to miscommunication or automated processes you are basically home free. Having so many people involved is as much a liability as any kind of benefit. It means more people to testify, and if you are involved in a cover up, more people willing to join in your conspiracy. Bigger companies also likelier have better guidelines regarding auto…
Not in all cases. But if it hits something like email records, it becomes a bit silly to think they’re doing it for any reasons other than that there’s stuff in the emails that’s going to hurt them (at some point).
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>Is it acceptable to accidentally destroy evidence? Theoretically no. In practice it's murkier. If you're a cop? Definitely not acceptable on paper but you'll get a slap on the wrist at best. If you're OJ Simpson and can afford a good lawyer? You will probably be found not-guilty. Peasants like you or I? They'll throw the book and something will stick. Edit: Am I being down-voted for being blunt or because reality ma…
I didn’t downvote you, but I think you were downvoted because the post you were replying to was asking a legal/ethical question about whether it’s acceptable to accidentally destroy evidence in general, and you gave an unsupported answer and then veered off into a discussion of whether the law is applied to all people fairly.
There’s no point arguing that storing a vat of milk in the sun counts as the law enforcement impounding incorrectly or the suspect deliberately arranging evidence to destroy itself, when the crux of the matter is that the defendant is a black woman in Alabama so has no chance of a fair trial regardless how airtight the case might seem.
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The GDPR regulation has some exceptions for legal requests and generally puts itself below local laws and regulations that specify further, to my knowledge, if you get a letter from the police/state that says some data is needed for a court case, you can safely ignore all deletion requests for that data until such time that the state/police request is no longer valid (ie, they copied it off your server). However, onc…
This again raises the issue of speech vs absence of speech. What if a cloud provider has applications that confirm deletions that are initiated by the user? A secret warrant prohibits disclosure of the warrant’s existence, but now we’re talking about a requirement to actively lie to users. I really don’t think that this hair-splitting.
Howdy, digital forensics software developer here. A few points: 1) yes, the police probably should have put the phone in a Faraday bag, but those aren’t perfect and municipal law enforcement generally doesn’t have the same equipment that state and federal police do. It doesn’t excuse the suspect allegedly taking action to destroy evidence; 2) this is probably about the boyfriend, who they suspect committed a shooting…
Seems like a tampering charge is better to take than a murder charge, though.
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> Does the answer change if you were officially under arrest and had a right to remain silent? Being formally under arrest doesn't affect whether you have the right to remain silent. It affects whether the police are required to tell you that you do.
Fascinating how this varies between nations and cultures. In Norwegian case law, refusing to explain yourself can be considered indirect evidence of guilt. I remember a report from a recent Norwegian criminal trial, where the judge himself warned the accused that refusing to give an explanation could reflect badly on the question of whether she was guilty or not.
The legal protection for refusing to speak in the US is the Fifth Amendment, which of course predates most modern police tactics. But there are basically no calls to change that, and it has a lot of cultural support too - there's plenty of media where "I ain't sayin' nothin'" marks a tough or well-informed character instead of a guilty one.
The other side of which is that US police have very few boundaries in interrogations other than giving a Miranda warning and avoid physical violence. A lot of police forces rely heavily on the Reid Technique, which presumes the suspect is guilty and has a long history of producing false confessions. They're also free to outright lie about both the state of evidence and how a confession will be handled.
I don't know a great deal about Norwegian policing, but just hearing this I would predict that "brought in for questioning" doesn't have the same "try to drag a confession out of you" associations it does in the US.