10 ms·

Not sure what the man's crime is here. Does he even remember his keys after sixteen months in the slammer? I don't even remember my Gmail password after 16 days

Not sure what the man's crime is here. Does he even remember his keys after sixteen months in the slammer? I don't even remember my Gmail password after 16 days of vacation. Basically, like the article says, it like not opening a safe for an inquisitor: you are damned if you do, you are damned if you don't. Encryption is nothing new people, you are just putting your data in a safe. We have a tendency to misconstrue, willfully misinterpret, or altogether ignore the law when it comes to prosecuting individuals who we believe to be standing on much lower moral ground. We do so because we want so badly to punish the accused that we are willing to reduce or eliminate greater good that some privacy laws are aiming to provide (i.e. Trumps silly travel ban which is based on his hatred of Muslims built upon imaginary news stories and personal exaggerations of particular recent events -- all laws out the window)

mirimir 10y ago
This was pretty much inevitable :( > Encryption is nothing new people, you are just putting your data in a safe. Well, you could also be held indefinitely for refusing to provide the combination for a safe. If there were safes that could keep them out indefinitely, anyway. I suspect that they nailed him using ICAC's Black Ice app. It's a hacked version of the Freenet client that logs peer IPs, and tracks hashes that they handle. So his mistake was assuming that deniability was adequate, and failing to hit Freenet via Tor. Edit: 2016-05-26 - Police department's tracking efforts based on false statistics: https://freenetproject.org/news.html#20160526-htl18attack https://freenetproject.org/news.html#20160526-htl18attack
- slantaclaus 10y ago
  Thanks for the background, but somebody has to say it: his failure was looking at child pornography.
  - mindslight 10y ago
    This is not an activity I want to engage in or even associate with people who do, but a nonviolent private activity is not a reason to violently persecute someone, especially to this degree.
    - __s 10y ago
      It's not a private activity, it directly supports an industry of violence against children
      - jhiska 10y ago
        You can make the same argument for the adult porn industry, and that leads to one of two conclusions: - That the viewer of adult porn shouldn't be prosecuted for viewing porn. or - That there is a societal / governmental acceptance of the exploitation of men and women, as long as they are adults. The easy argument out of this hypocrisy is to claim that while children can never consent, adults can, but then that opens the can of worms of whether they're "consenting" under coercion, like under threat of not getting hired again to do work or if they're enslaved, and the answer to that is that it depends on the case. At this point it turns political, with one side generalizing that most do consent, and another side also generalizing that most do not consent, and reaching an agreement is impossible because there is a half-truth to both sides, and after a lot of heated arguments, people get worn out, and nothing gets resolved. So instead I'm just going to direct people to read up on the topic of victimology, which is a sub-genre of criminology, specifically how it affects human traffic (which are >90% women, and has a total volume of enslaved people higher than it was when slavery was legal) and get informed and then make up their own mind about it without bothering others.
        Stanish 10y ago
        Yet another reason a universal basic income makes sense. Slavery by another name becomes much less likely.
        tnzn 10y ago
        I'm surprised you haven't been called a pedophile/pedophile supporter yet. Every time I tried to have that argument, it happened (tho not in HN).
        marksomnian 10y ago
        And that is the reason you can never have a rational discussion about the subject. No matter how strong the arguments you present, the other side can always say "b... but... but think about the terrorists and the paedophiles!" and if you reply you get called a sympathiser - for having a rational discussion. Welcome to 2017.
  - mirimir 10y ago
    Maybe. But we don't know whether he looked at CP or not.
    - bigiain 10y ago
      And lets face it, the NSA claim - and win in court with this claim - that "collecting and storing" personal communications doesn't count as surveillance, until a human queries the database and reads from the collected interceptions. While a personal hard drive full of child porn is unlikely to be "innocently" explained away quite that easily, I wonder if owners of, say, usenet binary hosting newsservers ever need to claim that defence?
      - externalreality 10y ago
        Bogus defense IMHO. Acquiring the ability to query a database is enough to constitute surveillance. I wonder if my land lord could use the same logic to legally record me in the shower. We have to understand that, much like it's a military's responsibility (and desire) to go to war, it is the goal of spy agencies to gather all the intelligence it possible can. In both cases it is up to law making bodies comprised of "the people" to check these agencies' ambitions.
        bigiain 10y ago
        I completely agree with you. It baffles me that anybody can stand up in front of their peers and claim "bulk collection" doesn't violate your privacy until/unless some human ever reads the data you've collected, and it's beyond parody that a judge in a court agreed with this example of mental gymnastics...
      - MertsA 10y ago
        >until a human queries the database and reads from the collected interceptions. Didn't it go further than this? Just searching the data for some signal wasn't a "search" because a machine did it, it was only a "search" if you were a match and if you were a match then they had "probable cause" for the search. Not entirely sure how accurate that is but FWIW it seemed like that was the accepted reading of the twisted reasoning on HN back when that came out.
  - iopq 10y ago
    But without 100% proof he can't be jailed. The prosecutors don't have enough evidence to prove it, so how can he be jailed for it already? "Innocent until proven guilty" is the foundation of our legal system
    - bigiain 10y ago
      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 drives as they would for the crimes that decrypting the drives expose? (At least I _hope_ that's his quandary - I sincerely hope the reality isn't that he's genuinely forgotten the passwords, and when the FBI/NSA _finally_ bruteforce it, they end up with baby photos, teenaged angst poetry, and a few bittorrented Hollywood movies... That does, at least, seem quite unlikely...)
      - mirimir 10y ago
        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 :(
        Natanael_L 10y ago
        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).
        mirimir 10y ago
        That's true, of course. But LEA are selecting nodes based on the hashes of those fragments. Many of them won't have cached CP fragments, but merely relayed them. But if his node did, prosecutors could argue that they've identified CP on his computer based on hashes, and have experts testify about reliability, etc. How many jurors would understand Freenet design?
  - literallycancer 10y ago
    >his failure was allegedly looking at child pornography FTFY It doesn't matter what they accuse him of, until they prove it, he's innocent.
    - dbg31415 10y ago
      Thanks. I don't care what the charge is, if the government can not prove their case without compelling the person to testify / provide evidence against himself the judge needs to throw that case out. This is terrifying that anyone could be jailed for using what anyone would consider their 5th amendment right.
    - hyperpape 10y ago
      He's innocent in court (and my non-lawyerly (aka worthless) sense says the fifth amendment favors him). But we're not a court, and our standard for speech shouldn't be "beyond a reasonable doubt". The parent poster was right. His failing was looking at child pornography.
      - EdHominem 10y ago
        Says who? Neither of us saw it, so we can't know. There's a procedure though that we use to determine the likelihood of someone's guilt, based on evidence and legal arguments. Would you like to hear about it?
        dllthomas 10y ago
        I think it's legitimate to say, in a discussion like this one where we're not dealing with punishment, that we should hold to a weaker standard (preponderance of evidence?) than should a criminal court. That said, as far as I'm aware the only evidence we've seen is that he's been accused of the crime. I don't what portion of accusations are false (or even a proxy like conviction rate in comparable situations).
        Freak_NL 10y ago
        That might seem reasonable at first glance, but it tends to turn into a witch hunt — especially with modern day communication channels. That is, you are effectively dealing with punishment (by treating a suspect as a criminal and tarnishing their reputation before being convicted) by not applying the same rigour as the courts.
- morgante 10y ago
  > Well, you could also be held indefinitely for refusing to provide the combination for a safe. Is there case law supporting that? Traditionally I think the combination would be considered forced testimony.
  - mirimir 10y ago
    Sorry, I got confused. In the US, keys can be compelled, but not combinations.[0] But the tide seems to be turning :( 0) https://www.quora.com/Can-a-search-warrant-compel-me-to-unlock-my-own-safe https://www.quora.com/Can-a-search-warrant-compel-me-to-unlo...
vivekd 10y ago
His crime is disobeying a court order, which is a crime that you can go to jail for. Just like if you had the key to a safe, and the court orders you to open the safe, you would go to jail if you refuse to do so. If he forgot the keys he could have told the court that and the court would evaluate his credibility. *edited changed from key to combination because combination locks are protected by the 5th amendment and keys are not.
- externalreality 10y ago
  Some are arguing that the court has no right to order him to do so. 5th amendment and some case rulings are mentioned.
- Programmatic 10y ago
  The courts can compel you to turn over something that you have. Something that you know is protected by the fifth amendment, in particular for combination locks. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/487/201/case.html https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/487/201/case.htm... """ JUSTICE STEVENS, dissenting. A defendant can be compelled to produce material evidence that is incriminating. Fingerprints, blood samples, voice exemplars, handwriting specimens, or other items of physical evidence may be extracted from a defendant against his will. But can he be compelled to use his mind to assist the prosecution in convicting him of a crime? I think not. He may in some cases be forced to surrender a key to a strongbox containing incriminating documents, but I do not believe he can be compelled to reveal the combination to his wall safe -- by word or deed. """
  - vivekd 10y ago
    great, now look up what "dissent" means. Dissent is legal mumbo jumbo for "stuff that ain't law." When you have a panel of judges, we go with the decision of the majority of judges. The decision of the minority of the judges is still published under the heading "dissent." It isn't the ruling and it doesn't affect the law, but it's published just to note that they disagreed and their reasons. There are some 5th amendment encryption cases where there is a question about whether the government has shown that there is a reasonable certainty that the files contain the evidence being sought. In those cases the 5th amendment would act to protect the info. That doesn't seem to be the case here and in that case, it seems like clear law that he would have to give up the data.
headShrinker 10y ago
> 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 they compel me to write an encryption key to decrypt data. Discloser all of my data is encrypted, and if the government asked I would really be torn about giving them keys.
- nyolfen 10y ago
  >They couldn't compel Apple write software to decrypt a phone. no, they didn't compel apple
  - Natanael_L 10y ago
    FBI tried but didn't get their will through
- derekp7 10y ago
  Or, what if you had a paper in a safe that was written in an invented language? They may be able to compel you to open the safe (i.e., provide a BIOS password), but can they compel you to teach them how to read that invented language?
  - krick 10y ago
    That's actually a much better example. Seriously, can they? It seems ridiculous, but then compelling you to decrypt anything is obviously ridiculous as well. Maybe you are reading and writing this data as is, who is to say? I guess, the real reason why this question stands is that nobody gives a fuck about logic and solid law, someone (obviously) just wants it to be a crime and it is easy to sway public opinion in a way that allows for it to account as one. Which, again, reminds us that the current state of the law is that it is rotten by default.
libertymcateer 10y ago
> Not sure what the man's crime is here. He didn't commit a crime. He is being held in jail for contempt of court. This is how the system works. This is no different than if a judge demanded that you turn over any other form of evidence - it should not be so shocking that you can be held in contempt for refusing to obey a court order. It is bad, however, that he is being let to rot indefinitely. That is the problem here - not that he was jailed for contempt in the first place.
- int_19h 10y ago
  I would dare say that the really bad part is that there's no way to know for sure if he can even comply with that order. As I understand, he claims that he has forgotten the password. Obviously, it's a convenient excuse, but it's not something utterly improbable. What if he actually did forget the password? Why is the word of the judge alone sufficient to assume otherwise? There seems to be an obvious lack of checks here.
  - sjy 10y ago
    > Why is the word of the judge alone sufficient to assume otherwise? There seems to be an obvious lack of checks here. Because the judge's finding is based on evidence – see my other comment[1]. The judicial power to make findings of fact is checked by the appeal process, which is now underway. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13633968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13633968
- naasking 10y ago
  > He didn't commit a crime. He is being held in jail for contempt of court. The problem is that contempt isn't classified as a crime and so it doesn't have a fixed term. There are moral hazards with having fixed terms like this, but the moral hazards of not having them, like this case, seem worse.
zhemao 10y ago
The difference is that the authorities can crack open a safe without the suspect cooperating. But it's virtually impossible to decrypt something without the receiving the key.
- hysan 10y ago
  Unless it's something akin to a Da Vinci cryptex that destroys the contents when forced open. Just scaled up to modern day encryption levels.

mirimir 10y ago

This was pretty much inevitable :( > Encryption is nothing new people, you are just putting your data in a safe. Well, you could also be held indefinitely for refusing to provide the combination for a safe. If there were safes that could keep them out indefinitely, anyway. I suspect that they nailed him using ICAC's Black Ice app. It's a hacked version of the Freenet client that logs peer IPs, and tracks hashes that they handle. So his mistake was assuming that deniability was adequate, and failing to hit Freenet via Tor. Edit: 2016-05-26 - Police department's tracking efforts based on false statistics: https://freenetproject.org/news.html#20160526-htl18attack https://freenetproject.org/news.html#20160526-htl18attack

slantaclaus 10y ago
Thanks for the background, but somebody has to say it: his failure was looking at child pornography.
- mindslight 10y ago
  This is not an activity I want to engage in or even associate with people who do, but a nonviolent private activity is not a reason to violently persecute someone, especially to this degree.
  - __s 10y ago
    It's not a private activity, it directly supports an industry of violence against children
    - jhiska 10y ago
      You can make the same argument for the adult porn industry, and that leads to one of two conclusions: - That the viewer of adult porn shouldn't be prosecuted for viewing porn. or - That there is a societal / governmental acceptance of the exploitation of men and women, as long as they are adults. The easy argument out of this hypocrisy is to claim that while children can never consent, adults can, but then that opens the can of worms of whether they're "consenting" under coercion, like under threat of not getting hired again to do work or if they're enslaved, and the answer to that is that it depends on the case. At this point it turns political, with one side generalizing that most do consent, and another side also generalizing that most do not consent, and reaching an agreement is impossible because there is a half-truth to both sides, and after a lot of heated arguments, people get worn out, and nothing gets resolved. So instead I'm just going to direct people to read up on the topic of victimology, which is a sub-genre of criminology, specifically how it affects human traffic (which are >90% women, and has a total volume of enslaved people higher than it was when slavery was legal) and get informed and then make up their own mind about it without bothering others.
      - Stanish 10y ago
        Yet another reason a universal basic income makes sense. Slavery by another name becomes much less likely.
      - tnzn 10y ago
        I'm surprised you haven't been called a pedophile/pedophile supporter yet. Every time I tried to have that argument, it happened (tho not in HN).
        marksomnian 10y ago
        And that is the reason you can never have a rational discussion about the subject. No matter how strong the arguments you present, the other side can always say "b... but... but think about the terrorists and the paedophiles!" and if you reply you get called a sympathiser - for having a rational discussion. Welcome to 2017.
- mirimir 10y ago
  Maybe. But we don't know whether he looked at CP or not.
  - bigiain 10y ago
    And lets face it, the NSA claim - and win in court with this claim - that "collecting and storing" personal communications doesn't count as surveillance, until a human queries the database and reads from the collected interceptions. While a personal hard drive full of child porn is unlikely to be "innocently" explained away quite that easily, I wonder if owners of, say, usenet binary hosting newsservers ever need to claim that defence?
    - externalreality 10y ago
      Bogus defense IMHO. Acquiring the ability to query a database is enough to constitute surveillance. I wonder if my land lord could use the same logic to legally record me in the shower. We have to understand that, much like it's a military's responsibility (and desire) to go to war, it is the goal of spy agencies to gather all the intelligence it possible can. In both cases it is up to law making bodies comprised of "the people" to check these agencies' ambitions.
      - bigiain 10y ago
        I completely agree with you. It baffles me that anybody can stand up in front of their peers and claim "bulk collection" doesn't violate your privacy until/unless some human ever reads the data you've collected, and it's beyond parody that a judge in a court agreed with this example of mental gymnastics...
    - MertsA 10y ago
      >until a human queries the database and reads from the collected interceptions. Didn't it go further than this? Just searching the data for some signal wasn't a "search" because a machine did it, it was only a "search" if you were a match and if you were a match then they had "probable cause" for the search. Not entirely sure how accurate that is but FWIW it seemed like that was the accepted reading of the twisted reasoning on HN back when that came out.
- iopq 10y ago
  But without 100% proof he can't be jailed. The prosecutors don't have enough evidence to prove it, so how can he be jailed for it already? "Innocent until proven guilty" is the foundation of our legal system
  - bigiain 10y ago
    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 drives as they would for the crimes that decrypting the drives expose? (At least I _hope_ that's his quandary - I sincerely hope the reality isn't that he's genuinely forgotten the passwords, and when the FBI/NSA _finally_ bruteforce it, they end up with baby photos, teenaged angst poetry, and a few bittorrented Hollywood movies... That does, at least, seem quite unlikely...)
    - mirimir 10y ago
      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 :(
      - Natanael_L 10y ago
        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).
        mirimir 10y ago
        That's true, of course. But LEA are selecting nodes based on the hashes of those fragments. Many of them won't have cached CP fragments, but merely relayed them. But if his node did, prosecutors could argue that they've identified CP on his computer based on hashes, and have experts testify about reliability, etc. How many jurors would understand Freenet design?
- literallycancer 10y ago
  >his failure was allegedly looking at child pornography FTFY It doesn't matter what they accuse him of, until they prove it, he's innocent.
  - dbg31415 10y ago
    Thanks. I don't care what the charge is, if the government can not prove their case without compelling the person to testify / provide evidence against himself the judge needs to throw that case out. This is terrifying that anyone could be jailed for using what anyone would consider their 5th amendment right.
  - hyperpape 10y ago
    He's innocent in court (and my non-lawyerly (aka worthless) sense says the fifth amendment favors him). But we're not a court, and our standard for speech shouldn't be "beyond a reasonable doubt". The parent poster was right. His failing was looking at child pornography.
    - EdHominem 10y ago
      Says who? Neither of us saw it, so we can't know. There's a procedure though that we use to determine the likelihood of someone's guilt, based on evidence and legal arguments. Would you like to hear about it?
      - dllthomas 10y ago
        I think it's legitimate to say, in a discussion like this one where we're not dealing with punishment, that we should hold to a weaker standard (preponderance of evidence?) than should a criminal court. That said, as far as I'm aware the only evidence we've seen is that he's been accused of the crime. I don't what portion of accusations are false (or even a proxy like conviction rate in comparable situations).
        Freak_NL 10y ago
        That might seem reasonable at first glance, but it tends to turn into a witch hunt — especially with modern day communication channels. That is, you are effectively dealing with punishment (by treating a suspect as a criminal and tarnishing their reputation before being convicted) by not applying the same rigour as the courts.
morgante 10y ago
> Well, you could also be held indefinitely for refusing to provide the combination for a safe. Is there case law supporting that? Traditionally I think the combination would be considered forced testimony.
- mirimir 10y ago
  Sorry, I got confused. In the US, keys can be compelled, but not combinations.[0] But the tide seems to be turning :( 0) https://www.quora.com/Can-a-search-warrant-compel-me-to-unlock-my-own-safe https://www.quora.com/Can-a-search-warrant-compel-me-to-unlo...

vivekd 10y ago

His crime is disobeying a court order, which is a crime that you can go to jail for. Just like if you had the key to a safe, and the court orders you to open the safe, you would go to jail if you refuse to do so. If he forgot the keys he could have told the court that and the court would evaluate his credibility. *edited changed from key to combination because combination locks are protected by the 5th amendment and keys are not.

externalreality 10y ago
Some are arguing that the court has no right to order him to do so. 5th amendment and some case rulings are mentioned.
Programmatic 10y ago
The courts can compel you to turn over something that you have. Something that you know is protected by the fifth amendment, in particular for combination locks. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/487/201/case.html https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/487/201/case.htm... """ JUSTICE STEVENS, dissenting. A defendant can be compelled to produce material evidence that is incriminating. Fingerprints, blood samples, voice exemplars, handwriting specimens, or other items of physical evidence may be extracted from a defendant against his will. But can he be compelled to use his mind to assist the prosecution in convicting him of a crime? I think not. He may in some cases be forced to surrender a key to a strongbox containing incriminating documents, but I do not believe he can be compelled to reveal the combination to his wall safe -- by word or deed. """
- vivekd 10y ago
  great, now look up what "dissent" means. Dissent is legal mumbo jumbo for "stuff that ain't law." When you have a panel of judges, we go with the decision of the majority of judges. The decision of the minority of the judges is still published under the heading "dissent." It isn't the ruling and it doesn't affect the law, but it's published just to note that they disagreed and their reasons. There are some 5th amendment encryption cases where there is a question about whether the government has shown that there is a reasonable certainty that the files contain the evidence being sought. In those cases the 5th amendment would act to protect the info. That doesn't seem to be the case here and in that case, it seems like clear law that he would have to give up the data.

headShrinker 10y ago

> 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 they compel me to write an encryption key to decrypt data. Discloser all of my data is encrypted, and if the government asked I would really be torn about giving them keys.

nyolfen 10y ago
>They couldn't compel Apple write software to decrypt a phone. no, they didn't compel apple
- Natanael_L 10y ago
  FBI tried but didn't get their will through
derekp7 10y ago
Or, what if you had a paper in a safe that was written in an invented language? They may be able to compel you to open the safe (i.e., provide a BIOS password), but can they compel you to teach them how to read that invented language?
- krick 10y ago
  That's actually a much better example. Seriously, can they? It seems ridiculous, but then compelling you to decrypt anything is obviously ridiculous as well. Maybe you are reading and writing this data as is, who is to say? I guess, the real reason why this question stands is that nobody gives a fuck about logic and solid law, someone (obviously) just wants it to be a crime and it is easy to sway public opinion in a way that allows for it to account as one. Which, again, reminds us that the current state of the law is that it is rotten by default.

libertymcateer 10y ago

> Not sure what the man's crime is here. He didn't commit a crime. He is being held in jail for contempt of court. This is how the system works. This is no different than if a judge demanded that you turn over any other form of evidence - it should not be so shocking that you can be held in contempt for refusing to obey a court order. It is bad, however, that he is being let to rot indefinitely. That is the problem here - not that he was jailed for contempt in the first place.

int_19h 10y ago
I would dare say that the really bad part is that there's no way to know for sure if he can even comply with that order. As I understand, he claims that he has forgotten the password. Obviously, it's a convenient excuse, but it's not something utterly improbable. What if he actually did forget the password? Why is the word of the judge alone sufficient to assume otherwise? There seems to be an obvious lack of checks here.
- sjy 10y ago
  > Why is the word of the judge alone sufficient to assume otherwise? There seems to be an obvious lack of checks here. Because the judge's finding is based on evidence – see my other comment[1]. The judicial power to make findings of fact is checked by the appeal process, which is now underway. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13633968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13633968
naasking 10y ago
> He didn't commit a crime. He is being held in jail for contempt of court. The problem is that contempt isn't classified as a crime and so it doesn't have a fixed term. There are moral hazards with having fixed terms like this, but the moral hazards of not having them, like this case, seem worse.

zhemao 10y ago

The difference is that the authorities can crack open a safe without the suspect cooperating. But it's virtually impossible to decrypt something without the receiving the key.

hysan 10y ago
Unless it's something akin to a Da Vinci cryptex that destroys the contents when forced open. Just scaled up to modern day encryption levels.