Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Man Who Refused to Decrypt Hard Drives Still in Prison After Two Years

bleepingcomputer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 284 posts

Re: Man Who Refused to Decrypt Hard Drives Still in Prison After Two Years

#51

Post by dozzie »

stephengillie wrote: post #15
xtanx wrote: post #11

"Investigators said content stored on the encrypted hard drive matched file hashes for known child pornography content." If the disk is encrypted how can they match file hashes? Do they encrypt known CP files with the FileVault key and then compare? If so, isn't that enough to convict him?

Something doesn't add up in this story. Encryption and hashing are different processes with different algorithms - SHA vs MD5. For example, IPSec VPNs hash a packet with MD5 to prevent tampering, then encrypt the hash with SHA256 to prevent viewing. (Because the message could be modified while encrypted, were it not also hashed.) Isn't the point of encryption that it doesn't create a reliable hash - that 2 identical…

> Encryption and hashing are different processes with different algorithms - SHA vs MD5. For example, IPSec VPNs hash a packet with MD5 to prevent tampering, then encrypt the hash with SHA256 to prevent viewing.

You do realize that MD5, SHA-1, and SHA-256 are all hashing algorithms? I highly doubt you meant a cipher built from a hash function (easy to do with Feistel net, though nobody does that), especially that IPsec doesn't define any such thing, from what I remember.

Given that you apparently don't understand how encryption and hashing work and relate to each other, you're not in a position to question the technical aspects of the story.

Re: Man Who Refused to Decrypt Hard Drives Still in Prison After Two Years

#52

Post by djsumdog »

simonbarker87 wrote: post #42

Given the could convict him right now, my guess is that they are trying to bargain in some way to get access to the HDDs as a way to 1) try to find the children being abused and 2) access a wider ring of child absusers etc. Given the legal grey area this all appears to be in and the potential upside of getting in to the HDDs this seems like something the authorities would be ok doing while the law catches up.

Or they're using it as the case to challenge encryption. If this goes to the supreme court, a decision on this will set some major prescient on encryption.

Re: Man Who Refused to Decrypt Hard Drives Still in Prison After Two Years

#53

Post by lagadu »

watwut wrote: post #4
godzillabrennus wrote: post #2

The accused crime is heinous and there is some evidence against him stated in the article but common, an indefinite jail sentence with no conviction? Then people wonder why the country elects Trump to shake things up. This guy should stand trial or be let go.

Trump quite explicitely promised to double on police and prosecutor power. If what you want is better protection for accused, Trump is last person you should vote for.

I think the argument is that the system already allowed for this before Trump so it's only natural that people angry at a system will vote towards who they perceive to be as far away from it as possible and Trump definitely hits the mark there, compared to the competition.

Re: Man Who Refused to Decrypt Hard Drives Still in Prison After Two Years

#54

Post by SolaceQuantum »

I think, importantly and regardless of the crime itself, I would like to ask: what can be done here and how did we get to this point? We have someone who has been in prison indefinitely who hasn't been charged with anything. What can be done about this situation even if we raise awareness? Also, how did we get to the point where this is legal?

Re: Man Who Refused to Decrypt Hard Drives Still in Prison After Two Years

#56

Post by JohnBooty »

mcny wrote: post #6
godzillabrennus wrote: post #2

The accused crime is heinous and there is some evidence against him stated in the article but common, an indefinite jail sentence with no conviction? Then people wonder why the country elects Trump to shake things up. This guy should stand trial or be let go.

Absolutely but I'll go further. Having something in your hard drive or book or whatever should never be a crime in itself. I mean in India it is a crime to carry an authentic map of India with you. What harm does the contents of an encrypted disk do to society? It is not like he was going out and trying to legalize child abuse. If the person was involved in child abuse, we must try to convict him absolutely but we sh…

Yeah, I'm uncomfortable with the banning of certain kinds of content.

The root problem here is child abuse. Anybody abusing children, or financially supporting the abuse of children, is doing a seriously bad thing and this is what should be illegal.

I'm highly skeptical that images on a hard drive can cause the abuse of children. That's the same kind of logic people used back in the 1970s to argue that playing D&D and listening to Kiss were going to result in a whole generation of Satan-worshippers.

You could show a non-pedophiliac person the entire contents of that hard drive, and it wouldn't arouse them or make them want to go abuse children. Wouldn't make me go abuse kids. I'd probably cry a lot and go volunteer to help some kids[1]. So I am not convinced that the contents of this guy's hard drive are going to result in more kids being molested somehow.

If anything, I think the opposite may be more likely. Access to porn is correlated to a reduction in rape. I don't know if this extends to pedophiles, but it sure seems entirely possible: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/all-about-sex/201601/ev...

Would I want my kids hanging around somebody with a hard drive full of that stuff? Probably not, but I also wouldn't want them hanging around supporters of certain political parties either, and I don't think they should be rotting in prison indefinitely with no trial.

______

[1] I already do volunteer work; no need to send me illegal porn in order to get me off of my couch

Re: Man Who Refused to Decrypt Hard Drives Still in Prison After Two Years

#57

Post by kakarot »

ivanbakel wrote: post #21
xtanx wrote: post #11

"Investigators said content stored on the encrypted hard drive matched file hashes for known child pornography content." If the disk is encrypted how can they match file hashes? Do they encrypt known CP files with the FileVault key and then compare? If so, isn't that enough to convict him?

Hashes might not fall under being "beyond reasonable doubt" - I'd be interested to see the legal history, if any, of them being used in convictions. There'll always be the argument of the pigeonhole principle. On a similar note, I wonder if this will spur interest in a kind of file-doping program to confuse hashes of drive contents. A few pixels won't make a difference if you're planning on just viewing some images.

I wonder if the same kind of error-tolerant fingerprinting used in technology like Shazam (recognizing songs from ambient recordings) could be generalized to combat such a doping program.

You might have to do more than change a few pixels here and a unicode character or meta tag there. I even suspect things like color grading and, say, something like batching multiple images or text files together into one file, could be accounted for.

Not to mention, such a doping program would preferably alter files in an imperceptible (aka, less mutated) fashion.

I am a bit of an audiophile with my music and go to great lengths to rip high-quality, lossless, perfectly-encoded tracks for the sake of historical preservation. I imagine some pedophiles feel the same way about their data and the thought of tampering with the data's original state is abhorrent.

Even a colorshift or one or two changed pixels might make it worthless in their eyes, much like a bad rip with barely perceptible clicks or an altered noise floor is worthless to me.

Re: Man Who Refused to Decrypt Hard Drives Still in Prison After Two Years

#58

Post by lsaferite »

> The suspect appealed the indefinite prison sentence twice, but both appeals failed. His lawyers tried to argue that holding him breaches his Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate himself, but appeal judges did not see it that way. Judges pointed out that the Fifth Amendment only applies to witnesses and that the prosecutors didn't call him as a witness but only made a request for him to unlock his device, hence Fifth Amendment protections did not apply.

> The government also said that Rawls doesn't have to provide them with his password anymore, as they only need him to perform the act of unlocking the hard drive.

Those two statements seem at great odds. If the government actually knows the password now, the only thing having the defendant himself unlock it does is make it some sort of testimonial fact. The prosecution will use the fact that the defendant unlocked the device himself a point to the jury.

Re: Man Who Refused to Decrypt Hard Drives Still in Prison After Two Years

#59

Post by geofft »

cabaalis wrote: post #46
geofft wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The fact remains that the government has not brought charges," Donoghue said in a telephone interview. "Our client has now been in custody for almost 18 months based on his assertion of his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination." To be clear (and I am pretty sure the public defender knows this, but is just phrasing it like this for public perception), the prosecution's position is that the Fif…

So much for that whole constitution thing anyway.. They can just create some "act" that overrides it! And nobody will complain because the person affected is the bad guy, until they come for them.

It doesn't override the Constitution, though. He's not compelled to testify against himself. In a pre-computer society, we'd understand the Fifth Amendment as allowing you not to testify to your crimes, but not allowing you to refuse the police the right to search your house with a court-signed warrant, simply because you keep incriminating things in the house.

It might exploit a loophole, though (and I also think there's a lot of room to argue over whether that analogy is actually the right one).

The one thing that's different with computers is that usually the police can just break into your house (or a safe, or something like that) if you refuse to give them the key, and encrypted drives have no other alternate route in. So you wouldn't be kept in prison indefinitely for refusing to comply with a warrant; you'd just get your door knocked down.

Re: Man Who Refused to Decrypt Hard Drives Still in Prison After Two Years

#60

Post by srge »

lenkite wrote: post #49

So the police no longer need to plant drugs. They can just plant encrypted hard drives to which you have 'forgotten' the password. Hard-drives containing hashes of 'bad' pics. And then you can spend your life in jail (unless you plead guilty) ?

This.

And what if you genuinely forget the password to one of your encrypted drive. Couldn't it be used to incriminate you on whatever charge?

Post reply on HN