29 ms·

Indefinite prison for suspect who won’t decrypt hard drives, US government says

• coreyp_1 10y ago
  This is an important constitutional issue! The subject may be deplorable, but the root issue is not. If it is a "foregone conclusion", then they should have no problem convicting the guy without forcing him to testify against himself. If it is not a "foregone conclusion", then they have been lying and are illegally (unconstitutionally) depriving him of his freedom for months, without even charging him with a crime!
  • INTPenis 10y ago
    >Investigators say they know child porn is on the drives. His sister saw some of it and the suspect is said to have shown his family an illicit video, too. So that's their basis for this "foregone conclusion" apparently. That at one point in time it was witnessed. That is very dangerous logic. The sadest thing in this is that it took child pornography to make the headlines, not political activism or journalism but the most despicable crime in our modern society.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • the-dude 10y ago
      Pedophilia is the new red scare
      • unlinker 10y ago
        Pedophilia is, sadly, far from being just a scare.
        • Hondor 10y ago
          Pedophilia is a sexuality. Some people are just that way inclined. Don't confuse child abuse with sexuality the way people used to do about gays. That's extremely harmful to actual pedophiles who may have done nothing wrong. It's not even classified as a disease unless it causes problems for the person afflicted with it.
          • vinceguidry 10y ago
            I wouldn't be so quick to claim they're doing nothing wrong. Every year, rhinos in Africa are threatened by poachers in Africa who want their horns for the black market in China. Every person who buys rhino horn in Africa, every person who is in a position to fight the unnecessary consumption of endangered animals and doesn't, is complicit in the destruction of their species. You don't get a pass because you aren't the one who actually killed the rhinos, or abused the children. Those rhinos wouldn't have gotten killed, those children wouldn't have gotten abused, if the demand weren't there. You don't get a pass because you "needed" rhino horn, or because you have a non-standard sexuality. The only socially-acceptable response to your needs is to not contribute to the exploitation of others.
            • corin_ 10y ago
              The person you are replying to wasn't saying that paedophiles who look at child porn aren't doing anything wrong. If he was, your rhino analogy would be a good one, and is the reason nearly everyone agrees that child porn should be illegal even if you are only viewing it. But he was saying that a being attracted to children is in itself not doing anything wrong. Plenty of paedophiles don't look at child porn, do anything to children, or negatively affect children in any way. The rhino equivilent would be if you wanted to use rhino horn but because you know it would be wrong to, you never do use it. Not only are you not the one shooting the rhino, you're not creating demand for shooting rhinos either.
              • vinceguidry 10y ago
                > But he was saying that a being attracted to children is in itself not doing anything wrong. > The rhino equivilent would be if you wanted to use rhino horn but because you know it would be wrong to, you never do use it. I would argue that both of these things are wrong, though not as wrong as actually acting on the desires. I don't think there should be any legal consequences for the thoughts in your head, but the social stigma and pressure to change those thoughts is very much needed and is a useful social tool for protecting vulnerable classes. Let's introduce another analogy. Racism is wrong, if you think racist thoughts, even if you never act on them, then you are contributing to the denigration and subjugation of people of color. The only socially-acceptable response to having racist thoughts is to work to change those thoughts. Paedophilia may be sexuality, and yes, it was wrong to demonize homosexuality, but unless you're arguing that one day we'll look at paedophilia the same way, then you can't put them in the same boat morally. Celibacy is an acceptable response to paedophilic sexuality, but a better one is to stop being a paedophile. Sex therapists exist, it is something you can work on. It's worth it to at least try.
      • ctack 10y ago
        Don't forget terrorism.
    • Kristine1975 10y ago
      I wouldn't call looking at pictures (even of victims of child sexual abuse) "the most despicable crime in our modern society". The child sexual abuse itself is worse. Also torture, wars of aggression, mass poisoning...
      • INTPenis 10y ago
        I was thinking of a modern twist of pedophilia where digital media has become a way to spread the product of child abuse. But maybe also that it's more relevant today due to the people being more informed and connected. So I was actually separating it in its modern form from much older issues like war, torture and poisoning for example. But that's a non issue really, sorry for unclear phrasing.
    • belorn 10y ago
      A witness and some traces of keywords used on the suspect computer. I would not be too surprised if that was enough for a conviction, but the question remains on why the decryption should be necessary if the judge is already convinced beyond doubt that the accused is guilty. Its not like the courts put convicted murderers under contempt orders for failing to say where the body is buried.
      • userulluipeste 10y ago
        "Its not like the courts put convicted murderers under contempt orders for failing to say where the body is buried." I (can only) presume that this is not something easily comparable to a murder. This is more like catching someone with illicit drugs, where the possessed quantity can be essential to establishing the due penalty.
    • s_q_b 10y ago
      It's also totally insignificant. He could have broadcast it all over Times Square. That in no way waives his right against self-incrimination under the Fifth Amendment. Also, every prosecutor in history has thought their entire case in chief was a "foregone conclusion." That's totally irrelevant.
      • Bartweiss 10y ago
        It's baffling to me that people are treating "he will be found guilty" as evidence that he's already guilty and can be punished freely. We've got a code of laws specifically designed to avoid Inquisition-style "accusation of guilt is presumption of guilt" thinking.
        • Kristine1975 10y ago
          In the past in Europe, there existed the concept of "partially guilty." Someone got shot and you were seen in the vicinity of the crime scene with a gun? You're 25% guilty. Then you're tortured (since you're 25% guilty, it's not torture of an innocent, but punishment), and under torture you "confess", making you fully guilty. Source: Foucault's Discipline and Punish
          • Bartweiss 10y ago
            That's absolutely fascinating, thank you. I need to finally suck it up and go read Discipline and Punish. As much as I'm not on board with "confession through torture", I wonder if non-boolean guilt could help sort out some of the dumber quirks of our legal system. As is we just have "innocent" and "guilty" (which is either 51% chance of guilt in civil cases, or 'beyond reasonable doubt' in criminal ones). But we're clearly fumbling around for new values. The Supreme Court decision about retrials (that "probably would have been found innocent at original trial" is not enough to justify a retrial) clearly makes more sense in terms of real-valued guilt - we can then set some actual standard for retrial, which is different from the standard for conviction. Perhaps you get convicted at 90% guilty in criminal cases, but don't get to open a retrial unless your estimate drops to 70% guilty. Now I'm fascinated. What would real-valued guilt look like in a modern system?
  • officemonkey 10y ago
    Even if they have enough testimony to convict him, they may be more interested in forensic clues about where he obtained his files. Decrypting his hard drive may lead to other charges against other people. If he knows that he can incriminate others, he may be waiting for a deal. They're playing hardball with him right now. After six months in jail, watch them offer him a deal if he unlocks the hard drive. He gets a firm but reduced sentence (including time served) and they get more bad guys. (Why yes, I have watched too many episodes of Law & Order, why do you ask?)
    • mabbo 10y ago
      First sentence of the article says he's already been there 7 months. They won't get 'more bad guys', they just want to prove that they can do this to anyone who doesn't obey.
      • DanBC 10y ago
        Or they want to identify the child victims of sexual abuse, and want to make sure those children are safe, and that the people abusing them and taking photos of that abuse are prosecuted.
        • toolz 10y ago
          Somehow unethical law precedent always seems to come at the aid of women and children. I have a very hard time buying into that overused excuse. How likely do you think it is that the children fall into their jurisdiction? Much less even, do you think they'll be able to identify young undocumented children?
          • Kristine1975 10y ago
            >How likely do you think it is that the children fall into their jurisdiction? Since child porn is illegal just about everywhere (although the definition of "child" may vary), it should pose no problem to notify the authorities in the country of origin.
  • rubyfan 10y ago
    I kind of agree that if the government had evidence to convict or even charge him of a crime the burden is on the government. Though we all hate the underlying accusation and no one wants to protect this kind of activity, it is important that the government play by the rules. To do otherwise sets the precedent for future abuse on less heinous cases.
  • tptacek 10y ago
    It is not in fact settled law that unlocking an encrypted drive is testimonial. It's also worth remembering that the primary motivation for 5A is to prevent false, coerced testimony and torture; when SCOTUS eventually deals with this, they could find that no protected substantive rights are threatened by demands to unlock encrypted media. We're unlikely to get it both ways: both a right to strong encryption without government interference and a right to defy court demands to decrypt specific files. But we'll see.
    • throwaway7767 10y ago
      Realistically, how can we differentiate between a suspect who's refusing to unlock something, and a suspect who has genuinely forgotten his password? I know for myself, even with passwords I use multiple times a day from memory, it only takes a couple of months of not using them before I cannot recall them again. This guy has been locked up for 7 months. See also the numerous people who stored bitcoin in brain wallets (bad idea), who now cannot reclaim their money despite considerable financial incentive to do so.
      • tptacek 10y ago
        There is no foolproof way, but uncertainty is something the law has dealt with for centuries, and isn't unique to this situation. The short answer is: it gets argued in court like everything else. If cryptography introduces too many new cases of contempt, we'll need to rework the contempt system, and, in particular, introduce juries to the process (perhaps for contempt sentences exceeding a certain number of weeks).
        • CPLX 10y ago
          > uncertainty is something the law has dealt with for centuries, and isn't unique to this situation. The short answer is: it gets argued in court like everything else. Yes, precisely. This is a specific point I have seen programmer types uniquely vulnerable to tripping over. Courts, generally, aren't like computers, where a little technicality will override common sense completely in a literalistic following of instructions. Sure there are exceptions to this rule, but for the most part a court proceeding has humans running it that live in the actual society and have some ability to factor in not just the rules but also the consequences, including unintended ones, of their actions.
  • Bartweiss 10y ago
    I think people are undervaluing this point. Sure, you can say he's probably guilty, but the entire point of a jury trial is to determine that! "That guy's totally guilty" isn't a basis for any kind of prejudicial action - either you have enough info to try him, or you don't have enough info to hold him on suspicion.
  • e40 10y ago
    It is because the subject is deplorable that this is an issue. It is literally the only issue that would allow this trojan into the legal system.
  • akerro 10y ago
    > This is an important constitutional issue! The subject may be deplorable, but the root issue is not. Guilty unless proven otherwise. That's what constitution says.
• maremmano 10y ago
  and what happens if I forgot my password?
  • chopin 10y ago
    It's told in the headline, I believe...
  • INTPenis 10y ago
    >The defendant, who is referred to as "John Doe" in court papers, claims he forgot the passwords. The suspect's identity is Francis Rawls, according to trial court papers. > In fact, Doe had multiple layers of password protection on his devices, and he always entered his passcodes for all of his devices from memory. Doe never had any trouble remembering his passcodes (other than when compelled to do so by the federal court), never hesitated when entering the passcodes, and never failed to gain entry on his first attempt.
    • oarsinsync 10y ago
      Which in itself isn't really valid. Under immense stress, memory fails. I'd wager facing a long prison sentence for a crime that will make you a big target in an already hostile environment would be pretty stressful.
      • dkersten 10y ago
        I was going to comment the same thing. If I'd been imprisoned for 7 months, there's a good chance I'd forget my password manager master password too... I remember it now because I enter it multiple times a day. After 7 months, under duress and stress? I'm not sure if I would...
        • SixSigma 10y ago
          I'm not so sure. It's going to be on your mind constantly, surely.
• BillinghamJ 10y ago
  In the UK, this is actually legal sadly.
  • oarsinsync 10y ago
    Sections 49 & 53 of the RIPA allows for up to two years imprisonment for failing to provide unencrypted copies of key material. Not quite the same as life. Although I wouldn't be surprised if they managed to abuse it in this way.
    • DanBC 10y ago
      This case involves "child indecency", and so would be 5 years. But yes, there appear to be better protections. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/23/part/III http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/23/part/III (5)A person guilty of an offence under this section shall be liable— (a)on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding [F15the appropriate maximum term] or to a fine, or to both; (b)on summary conviction, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or to a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum, or to both. [F16(5A)In subsection (5) ‘the appropriate maximum term’ means— (a)in a national security case [F17or a child indecency case], five years; and (b)in any other case, two years.
    • patrickmay 10y ago
      > Although I wouldn't be surprised if they managed to abuse it in this way. Simple. Imprison someone for two years. Demand they provide key material again. Rinse and repeat.
      • kennywinker 10y ago
        Idk how it works in the UK, but in the US you can't charge someone for the same crime twice.
        • yompers888 10y ago
          .. Unless they've committed it twice. 'Failure to abandon your fifth amendment rights', 05/2016. 'Failure to abandon your fifth amendment rights', 05/2018. 'Failure to abandon your fifth amendment rights', 05/2020. etc.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• davideous 10y ago
  Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
  • mattraibert 10y ago
    In case you're curious, this is often called rubber-hose cryptanalysis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-hose_cryptanalysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-hose_cryptanalysis
    • ommunist 10y ago
      In Russia, if you are curious this is often called rectal high temperature cryptanalysis. There is manual. http://lurkmore.to/%D0%A2%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BC%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BF%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%B7%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80 http://lurkmore.to/%D0%A2%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BC%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B...
  • unlinker 10y ago
    I wish HN software would automatically start flagging comments that only contain a link to an xkcd strip.
• tetrep 10y ago
  I find this interesting, as I would almost certainly have forgotten my password by now, it only takes me 4-6 months of never using a password to forget it, so I wonder what happens if you can't decrypt your drives, due to honest forgetting from sitting in jail refusing to, or from some sort of deadman's switch or similar that drops keys after N days.
  • 15155 10y ago
    > or similar that drops keys after N days This cannot exist on "dumb" hardware.
• Havoc 10y ago
  Thats pretty scary. I've travelled with encrypted drives where I didn't know the password before. (Forgot it & was bringing the drive to someone for their own use after formatting).
• lossolo 10y ago
  "USA land of the free..." Really what happened with your country ? In EU you can't imprison someone for not decrypting hard drive if he says it can incriminate him, everyone understand this but not the biggest democracy in the world?
  • chefkoch 10y ago
    The whole EU? No, a small island has some lunitic laws. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#United_King...
    • lossolo 10y ago
      Not all EU, but countries like Poland, Netherlands etc. can't make you decrypt if you are suspect.
    • mg794613 10y ago
      Well, to be fair the UK is more like the 51st state than part of the EU.
  • TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Well, their democratically elected leaders said the idea of "innocent until proven guilty" is obsolete and probably supports terrorism. Democracy is a political system, not a synonym of being thoroughly good and fair. As for "land of the free", that's propaganda.
  • s_q_b 10y ago
    Neither British common law or Continental law systems have any mechanism to challenge this type or behavior. At least in the US, there's an absolute right against self-incrimination, guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment. The higher courts have been pretty clear, going all the way back to combination locks, that coercing a password would constitute requiring a defendant to incriminate him or herself. The actions of the judge should be overturned based not only on existing precedent, and principles of fairness and good faith, but also because they violate the privilege against self-incrimination.
• mmf 10y ago
  This effectively makes forgetting one's password a crime with a lifetime jail sentence... Not bad, not bad
  • Benjamin_Dobell 10y ago
    No it doesn't. They found evidence on his computer that strongly suggests there is child porn on the encrypted drive, there are witnesses that claim "John Doe" showed them child porn and he admitted to knowing the password initially, it was only later he claimed he forgot. Prosecutors need sufficient evidence to obtain from a judge warrants, and in this case a decryption order, before they can hold you in contempt of court. Of course, the evidence required for a warrant is still typically less than what is necessary to convict. The issue here is something to do with fifth amendment rights, which honestly I don't know a lot about because I'm Australian.
• upofadown 10y ago
  >... it's a "foregone conclusion" that illegal porn is on the drives, ... Obviously not if the government needs the suspect to tell them where to find the porn in the keyspace. The porn at this point literally does not exist on the computer. The government is asking the suspect to find it for them there. So the question here is; can the government compel someone to help the government find evidence against them? This reminds me of something a Pakistani coworker said. He said that in the area of Pakistan he grew up in they had the best police force anywhere. There were no unsolved crimes. Someone always confessed... So this is the same sort of thing. Torture someone long enough with indefinite detention and they will eventually come up with something to indict themselves with. There has to be something illegal in any well used computer.
  • cauterized 10y ago
    Pretty sure that's in violation of the fifth amendment (self-incrimination).
• tptacek 10y ago
  Contempt is appealable, and in stories about appeals for long contempt sentences it appears that the likely sentence for the underlying matter is a factor. So, as a practical matter, this might mean that refusal to unlock a drive will net you the same sentence as if you were tried and found guilty for whatever crime was supposed to be on the drive.
• jmnicolas 10y ago
  I'm quite surprised that they can break Freenet but can't break FileVault (I remember reading an article about a Filevault master password that is short and brute-forceable but can't find it atm). I would have bet the other way around.
  • htns 10y ago
    Freenet has only symbolic privacy protection for downloaders. Privacy is supposed to come from your node requesting not only blobs it is downloading for itself, but also blobs other nodes have requested from it. Unfortunately, as far as I understand, freenet's routing algorithm is such that these two classes of requests come from blatantly different statistical distributions. The further a requested blob is from a node's address the more likely it is the node is requesting the blob for itself. Another layer of protection is the blocks being encrypted, but if they are publicly published that can be changed with a bit of scraping. What this means is that by running a single freenet node you can monitor half a hundred others. What's surprising is that it hasn't been done earlier. You don't even have to commit a crime to do it as a civilian. This could have been avoided if freenet was hoisted on top of tor (not totally trivial because freenet runs over udp) or had an onion routing layer of its own. If the glaring privacy flaw was fixed freenet would have amazing properties which tor lacks, namely very safe and scalable (no dos unless you take down the whole of freenet) static hosting and non-realtime communication in general, and utter censorship resistance. Trying to figure out who has a blob only spreads it around more. It's a shame the ideas behind tor and freenet haven't come together in a popular project.
• virmundi 10y ago
  The best part of this whole story is the unintended consequence of attack. Don't like someone, encrypt a zip drive with drivel, toss it in his car and call the cops. Say you saw him looking at what could be kiddie porn. The guy doesn't know the password. Life in prison. No excuse. This applies not merely to Bob in Accounting that's a dick, but to everyone: Congress! Start sniping political enemies. A jump drive here. A hard drive there. Soon, you could have 6 or so Congressional individuals going to jail for a child porn ring. The Feds would think it's a great prisoner dilemma. No one's turning on each other. Again, anonymous tip claiming that the right honorable Representative Duggans was watching kiddie porn late at night in his office. The same tipster told the police that while he was jacking it he thanked Representative O'Connel for the present over the phone (make sure to wait for an actual call so their is evidence). Sure eventually all of this will die down. Until then, for $100 bucks and a few hours you can sit back, eat some popcorn and watch the system implode. Do it right and you'll get years of fun for everyone.
  • Kristine1975 10y ago
    A zip drive with no fingerprints of the person it supposedly belongs to? Not very convincing. Also in this case the prosecution apparently has a bit more information that just "he did it": A subsequent forensic exam of his Mac Pro computer revealed that Doe had installed a virtual machine ... the examiner found one image of what appeared to be a 14-year-old child wearing a bathing suit and posed in a sexually suggestive position. There were also log files that indicated that Doe had visited groups titled: “toddler_cp,” “lolicam,” “hussy,” “child models – girls,” “pedomom,” “tor- childporn,” and “pthc,” terms that are commonly used in child exploitation. ... The exam showed that Doe accessed or attempted to access more than 20,000 files with file names consistent with obvious child pornography... and that he used the external hard drives seized by Delaware County detectives to access and store the images.
    • sspiff 10y ago
      Wouldn't stop the police from keeping him behind bars. "He went through the trouble of encrypting the drive and keeping it clean from prints, but we found it in his car. He's clearly a well organized, determined child porn consumer." Perhaps you have too much faith in law enforcement, or I have grown too cynical by what I perceive as the dawn of a new era of police states.
• ommunist 10y ago
  Scary sh#t. What if inmate forgot the password? I cannot remember 4-digit PIN on a year old card I hardly used.
• notayacht 10y ago
  Some theories I have heard in the past: * Law enforcement will claim (possibly lie) that a person is a child predator in order to get cooperation from neighbors/etc. Who wouldn't want to help get a child predator off the streets? If you don't assist, maybe you're a child predator yourself! * Law enforcement can plant child pornography with relative ease. Maybe a polaroid tossed into your back yard or left on your trash can outside. Or maybe an image with CSS display:none injected into some webpage you visit (which may sit in your cache for some time). Normally I would consider these to be conspiracy theories. But when we start seeing stories like this, I have to wonder if there is any manipulation here. We the people respond pretty intensely to any accusations of sexual abuse of a child. Our knee-jerk reaction is "get the noose ready!", so we're pretty open to manipulation. Maybe this guy is guilty as hell...but this is a ridiculous precedent to set. What happens if someone sustains a cranial injury that affects their memory?
• cypherpunks01 10y ago
  This certainly points towards having more widespread support for plausible deniability, no? Are there any mass encryption tools that are reasonably simple to set up providing this (besides TrueCrypt Hidden Volumes)? Would someone continue to be held in contempt if they furnished a decrypted drive that didn't contain the information that court held as a "foregone conclusion" that it contained?
  • DennisP 10y ago
    Why besides TrueCrypt?
    • nicolapcweek94 10y ago
      because it's supposed to be broken and/or backdoored since may 2014 when the development abruptly stopped and weird warnings appeared on the official site to switch to alternative programs
      • striking 10y ago
        Although, who really knows at this point. Judge for yourself what happened: https://mastermind.atavist.com/he-always-had-a-dark-side https://mastermind.atavist.com/he-always-had-a-dark-side
      • danielweber 10y ago
        There's no evidence it's been "backdoored since may 2014." There were no changes at that point in time.
        • aendruk 10y ago
          "supposed [...] since may 2014"
  • htns 10y ago
    Tails combined with any encrypted cloud hosting service accepting anonymous payments (e.g. mega.nz, though I'm sure there are ones with better desktop integration) would offer more deniability than any local solution could, though it's debatable if paying is reasonably simple.
• probably_wrong 10y ago
  I agree with the overall idea that this is an interesting/problematic case, but I think the discussion would be better served if we stopped assuming that the authorities here are morons. No, forgetting your password is not a lifetime sentence. No, not knowing the password for an item you've never seen is not a lifetime sentence either. Refusing to obey a judge's order, however, will get you in trouble. Again, these people are not morons, and if they say the guy is only pretending to have forgotten his password (a dishonest criminal? shocking), they might have a good reason.
  • hiq 10y ago
    The reasons are stated in the article (the suspect never mistyped his password, and always remembered it), and addressed by the commentators you criticize (under pressure and after seven months without typing it, it is not impossible that you forget a possibly complicated password). Even if you think that chances are high that the guy both is guilty of some crime and remembers the password, that still leaves the "what if he is actually innocent and actually forgot his password" case. Indefinite prison sure seems a hard sentence in the latter case, which you cannot refute beyond reasonable doubt.
    • zaroth 10y ago
      > The suspect never mistyped his password, and always remembered it They even went so far as to say he always got it right on the first try. I found that very interesting... How would they possibly know that? If they had a key logger obviously they would already know the password. Does FileVault store some indication of failed login count? That isn't reset after a valid login?
      • zaroth 10y ago
        Actually, does this mean that Apple could be logging successful / unsuccessful decryption counts for FireVault volumes? Is there some sort of lock-out feature they are running?
    • cwyers 10y ago
• astazangasta 10y ago
  Why doesn't the Fifth Amendment cover this?
  • whamlastxmas 10y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11713015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11713015
  • mordocai 10y ago
    It does IMHO, but the court apparently disagrees.
  • rthomas6 10y ago
    For much the same reason that it's not against the fifth amendment to ask a suspect to unlock a safe. http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=2897 http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=2897
• ddd1600 10y ago
  The all writs act is 100% american and 100% constitutional, EVERYBODY SAYS SO
• vox_mollis 10y ago
  The exam showed that Doe accessed or attempted to access more than 20,000 files with file names consistent with obvious child pornography Is nobody else alarmed that OS X apparently logs any and all( or at least 20k records )file accesses by default? This is way too many to be found in the HFS journal, so it's clearly intentionally logging all accesses. Edit: They also appear to have been able to deanonymize the defendant's FreeNet usage, though this could have easily been OPSEC violations rather than technical shenanigans.
• nluux 10y ago
  Let's not use euphemisms like "kiddie porn" and realize the danger that child pornography feeds the child slavery industry. The core issue is that the suspect is potentially hiding his network, clients or victims' identities. Until he surrenders his hard drives, the truth may never come out.
  • andrewla 10y ago
    If there is useful information for law enforcement unrelated to the case at hand, it seems that we have plenty of already-existing mechanisms. They could offer him immunity in exchange for unlocking the drive, thus completely skirting the fifth amendment issue, or they could convict him based on other evidence, and offer favorable sentencing in exchange for unlocking the drive. The fact that he is being compelled to offer evidence against himself seems like the dubious part of this whole proceeding.
• silveira 10y ago
  Apart from the obvious assault on the presumption of innocence here, is there a cryptographic file-system that stores a secret X and Y that given a key k_x would decrypt the content X and given k_y would decrypt the content Y without revealing to an attacker that there are multiple contents? If yes, than one could store a real secret X and store a false secret Y, something that looks like a secret enough to be perceived as a secret. Then in case of torture, government persecution, etc, the victim could reveal only Y.
  • Veratyr 10y ago
    Yes, this was a feature of Truecrypt, though I'm not familiar with the underlying crypto.
    • maxerickson 10y ago
      It just uses data layout. Normal volumes have some wasted space filled with random data. Volumes with hidden volumes inside them fill that space with a second header. If the outer volume is naively mounted, writes can destroy the data stored in the inner volume.
  • scld 10y ago
    TrueCrypt has a feature like this. Not sure if its efficacy but the idea is that you have a password that decrypts to one thing and password that decrypts to another, I believe?
  • mrwizrd 10y ago
    This is known as deniable encryption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniable_encryption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniable_encryption
  • rtkwe 10y ago
    > His sister saw some of it, and the suspect is said to have shown his family an illicit video, too. > Within the virtual machine the examiner found one image of what appeared to be a 14-year-old child wearing a bathing suit and posed in a sexually suggestive position. There were also log files that indicated that Doe had visited groups titled: “toddler_cp,” “lolicam,” “hussy,” “child models – girls,” “pedomom,” “tor- childporn,” and “pthc,” terms that are commonly used in child exploitation. > The exam also found that Freenet, the peer-to-peer file sharing program used by Doe to obtain child pornography from other users, had been installed within the virtual machine. The exam showed that Doe accessed or attempted to access more than 20,000 files with file names consistent with obvious child pornography... and that he used the external hard drives seized by Delaware County detectives to access and store the images. They have a pretty strong amount of evidence that what's in those drives will be CP.
• jimrandomh 10y ago
  Seven months imprisoned without trial and counting. The technicalities about contempt and hard drives are a distraction; the real injustice is that, as a routine matter, the US government no longer gives trials without extensive pre-trial punishment.
• andai 10y ago
  what would happen if a suspect destroyed the keys?
• andai 10y ago
  What would happen if the suspect destroyed keys prior to arrest? (ignoring the similar difficulty of proving this)
• jupp0r 10y ago
  One more reason to have plausible deniability features.
• joshfraser 10y ago
  The ACLU or EFF need to jump on this case. The precident set by this is too important to leave to some randomly assigned public defender.
• kragen 10y ago
  Ars Technica chose to illustrate this article with a perspective-distorted screenshot of md5-crypt-encrypted passwords, the entire point of which is to prevent the person who has the encrypted password from being able to decrypt it.