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Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives

arstechnica.com

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Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives

#341

Post by Natanael_L »

mirimir wrote: post #217
bigiain wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other precedents I think. Here (Sydney Australia) the penalty for refusing a roadside alcohol test is the same as the top range blood alcohol penalty. So you can refuse a test, and they'll penalise you assuming the worst-case result you could have produced. I'm guessing this guy is in a quite perplexing quandary - he's betting on whether they'll keep him in jail for as long for refusing to decrypt the drive…

If he was using Freenet, there's no doubt that his node handled chunks of CP files, and that at least some of those chunks remain on the drive. Let's say that he never viewed any CP. Even then, can he be sure that investigators won't discover evidence that could be spun to demonstrate that he did view CP? It is quite a quandary :(

If you didn't request it, your node won't hold decryption keys to the files.

Might not help him if they believe that the encrypted keyless fragments is enough (which would be a horrible legal argument).

Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives

#342

Post by GTP »

I don't reside in the USA and I don't know the US law. After reading a certain amount of comments seems that the heart of the discussion is the fifth emendament. I agree that if the 5th emendament protects you from giving the combination of a safe logically follows that the same applies for encription passwords. But I don't agree with the root of this argumentation: if a court has a valid reason to think that a safe contains evidence that is relevant for the lawsuit, why should make any difference if the safe is locked with a physical key or with a combination? Somebody who has a different opinion could please explain me his point?

Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives

#343

Post by herbst »

jordache wrote: post #28
iamdave wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all the "bad guys" who distribute illegal material do so encrypted volumes and refuse to give up the decryption key then what do we do ? "Bad guys" still have fifth amendment protection. You prosecute, satisfy the burden of proof and hope a jury convicts. That's what you do. Outside of that, if you really want this changed, petition your representative to repeal the fifth amendment, I suppose?

need to stop thinking from an american centric perspective.

I think it is right to think in a american context here because no other western country would hold someone for so long just because he probably forgot his password. This is obviously a american issue.

Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives

#344

Post by Zelmor »

Here we have an example of a forceful, totalitarian state. Where they cannot keep up their laws due to technological progress, they threaten you with violence and boredom (boredom as in sitting in a cage as long as you refuse to comply). In communist era Eastern Europe, secret police used to send in beautiful prostitutes and/or agents to deal with people held in captivity. Get a man to erect his penis. When that happened, strong men stormed the room, grabbed the victim, and inserted a glass rod into his penis. Then smashed it. I would not like to go into details on what they did to women. You can look that up.

Land of the Free - as long as you do not encrypt your shit, that is

Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives

#345

Post by herbst »

jessaustin wrote: post #132
Paul-ish wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is all 1s and 0s, I am curious how you feel about the NSA having a good deal of your personal information stored on their drives?

Do we get to choose to live in a world where that isn't the case? No? Hey that sounds like a good reason to have fewer laws we can be parallel-constructed into violating.

> Do we get to choose to live in a world where that isn't the case?

Kind of. I do my best to avoid any relation with the U.S. including avoiding visiting it, taking up a job or incoorperate there. So even thought i am monitored by some shitty govs, there is no legal way that it means anything.

Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives

#346

Post by Natanael_L »

nyolfen wrote: post #224
headShrinker wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Encryption is nothing new people, you are just putting your data in a safe. I know this is an old argument, but what if I put the contents in a paper shredder, in the safe? It's still the data, it's just that it went through the shredder. Why is ok for the government to compel you to change the state of the data from encrypted to unencrypted? They couldn't compel Apple write software to decrypt a phone. Why can the…

>They couldn't compel Apple write software to decrypt a phone. no, they didn't compel apple

FBI tried but didn't get their will through

Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives

#347

Post by Natanael_L »

droithomme wrote: post #37
AckSyn wrote: post #17

He shouldn't have to decrypt his hard drives, and I support his decisions. The problems with this are numerous. First of all no one has any duty to provide the police with evidence as a 5th amendment protection. It's not a "right" for the police at all to have. Imprisoning someone for failure to disregard their constitutional rights is absurd. They have no evidence to hold him period.

"no one has any duty to provide the police with evidence as a 5th amendment protection" I like that idea. However, the 5th amendment's protection is something different: "No person shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." Consider the case of someone running a drug lab or counterfeiting press in their residence. Police show up with a warrant based on probable cause to search the resid…

Giving them the harddrive is like opening the door. Not my problem they can't read the documents they found.

Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives

#348

Post by Natanael_L »

cookiecaper wrote: post #84
mnm1 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is, one doesn't have to cooperate with a search warrant. The idea of encryption being a lock like on a locked door is ludicrous and downright dangerous. Using a fantasy metaphor in place of actual reality is incredibly misleading and outright manipulative. The difference between a lock and encryption is that all locks in the physical world can be broken by outside parties. If someone doesn't want to op…

It's not fantasy. Fantasy is a world where you can tell the police "I know how to open that thing that you have a lawful order to investigate, and you don't, so any crime of which I'm suspected is now uninvestigatable, nanny nanny boo boo". The analog with other difficult locks is just fine; the fact that these locks are so good that they are unbreakable doesn't really change anything about the accused's obligation t…

Being forced to decode written notes to incriminate yourself is about equal to producing the password that decodes the encrypted data.

In both cases you use a secret and some procedure to derive readable information from some other information.

And in both cases, it is generally impossible to prove you are able to!

Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives

#349

Post by MertsA »

realo wrote: post #206

I have a question... Suppose the suspect Alice only has a portion of the key. Someone else (Bob...) has the remaining key bits. Alice is busted, and 'compelled to give the key', and DOES provide her portion of the key. Bob is never found. Then Alice would be indefinitely imprisoned, even if she would have actually complied with the court order. It seems unethical, to me. Bonus question: Alice pretends that Bob exists…

>Alice pretends that Bob exists, but actually he does not, but police cannot prove that. What then?

Well it's pretty obvious what happens then. The police claim Alice is lying and hold her in contempt indefinitely. The man from the article claims that he doesn't remember the passwords anymore and can't possibly comply, he's still being held in contempt even though there's nothing concrete to show that he still knows the password.

Re: Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives

#350

Post by yAnonymous »

kybernetikos wrote: post #82
spaceboy wrote: post #19

I thought the U.S had better key disclosure law[1] than other countries? Personally I would rather not self-incriminate myself by revealing a key, no matter how draconian and lengthy the sentencing was. Why, you ask? Well I consider all my own personal data likened to an extension of my own mind, and revealing a key is like slicing a thin part of my brain and attempting to pick its contents. Never a gentlemanly thing…

If you need to cross a border, you will find that the border agents think they have the right to compel you to boot your laptop, including entering any secret or attaching any device required to do so. I doubt that they could ultimately stop you returning to your own country if you held out, but they could stop you leaving, and they could certainly make your life pretty miserable. In my opinion you'd be much better w…

Or just make GRUB invisibly boot to a default Windows install unless a key is pressed. They'll never see the other OS. A Tails install on a USB stick might raise questions if they bother to look at it.
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