81–90 of 160 posts
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Why wouldn't it be? It's the same as words on paper.
Because there is nothing 'physical' about it.
I'm kinda curious how the law would treat a dead man's switch that automatically wipes the phone if you haven't unlocked it for N hours (say, 24 or 48). (Assuming it was set up well before any event that prompted the phone's seizure, of course.) Could they somehow charge you for not warning the police about the auto-wipe when they took your phone? Does the answer change if you were officially under arrest and had a r…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoliation_of_evidence > The jury was instructed that they may find the failure by the store to retain (and subsequently provide to the other party) the additional footage may be considered an attempt to hide evidence that Brookshire Brothers' management knew would be damaging to their case. Although this may not be settled law.
> The Texas Supreme Court reversed, ordering a new trial, stating that it was abuse of discretion by the trial court to issue a spoliation inference instruction in this case, that the court should have imposed a different corrective measure on Brookshire Brothers (a less severe sanction), and that a spoliation inference instruction to the jury is only warranted in egregious cases of destruction of relevant evidence.
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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.
In Germany - and I assume in the States as well - being a witness will place much more legal duties on you than being a suspect. A witness for example can be obligated to give testimony. Which is why police sometimes intentionally declares a suspect a witness.
I guess the police will learn to put the phone in a Faraday cage as soon as it's seized
With regards to the scene from "Snowden" where he places the phones in a micro wave oven. I was surprised to find that this doesn't work - at least not with my grandma's oven.
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I would argue that you brought yourself in this mess. The only valid reason for having a canary is to evade the requirements of the law, so you can't complain. It's an argument, I'm no fan of secret orders or the government telling you to lie or keep quiet.
Fundamental rights generally override "you got yourself into this mess", don't they?
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If you deliberately do anything which will cause evidence to be placed beyond the reach of law enforcement then you are likely to be hit with charges. You can quibble over technical details, but at some point a judge will be asked if it fits the charge, and make a layman decision, not a programmer's one.
Then again, if a browser cookie is the only thing providing access to "evidence" on a particular machine, then it wasn't actually on that machine to begin with. That's far from a mere technical detail, as it also means the person lacked any meaningful physical control of, or proximity to, the evidence. I recall there are some cases that centered on whether someone was aware of the existence of a browser cache and kne…
That would still be irrelevant if their intention for getting themselves to "lack any meaningful physical control of, or proximity to, the evidence" is deemed by a judge to be malicious.
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That's not how warrant canaries work, though there is no case law I'm aware of that determines whether or not they are actually legal. The idea is that you have a message you update regularly to specify whether you have received an NSL -- you never delete the latest version. If you get an NSL you comply by doing nothing (and by your inactivity you've signalled that the warrant canary was tripped). There is a valid fr…
Schneier is right. Warrant canaries are just another side of the same coin as the sovereign citizen movement. Word games and magical thinking is not going to fool any judges. While I do think secret warrants are unjust most of the time (and nobody can verify that they are justly applied when applied), the intent of the law is obviously to not let anyone know about the warrant, if you do you have broken the law regard…
In Australia we have an explicit law which makes it illegal to talk about the existence or non-existence of a journalist surveillance warrant (though in Australia you might not even be aware of such a warrant's existence). This means that any discussion of such warrants is technically illegal -- making warrant canaries impossible to implement here. The minimum sentence is 2 years, and it's specifically targeted toward journalists (and affects anyone who shares already-public information -- so retweeting such a story on Twitter would be a serious crime).
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This point seems to get lost so often in these discussions - intent and a judge are involved here.
The described intent is definitely to get in the way, but it's not to destroy anything. "Intent and a judge are involved" is not a magic answer.
But who wiped the data anyway? Apple - sure she asked them to, but apple did it.
So that wont fly as an excuse to a judge. In general pedantic splitting hair arguments will more likely turn against the person.