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> A possible answer to the first question: Alice is not compelled to provide the key. She is compelled to decrypt the drive. Obviously she can't do that without

> A possible answer to the first question: Alice is not compelled to provide the key. She is compelled to decrypt the drive. Obviously she can't do that without Bob. Alice is screwed and will spend the rest of her life in prison. Yes, and in this scenario she would not be held in contempt, so your hypothetical does not apply. You can only be held in contempt for refusing to comply with court orders, not for the failure of a desired outcome. Let's put it another way: you are totally misunderstanding why this fellow is in jail. It is not because the hard drive remains encrypted - it is because he defied a court order to decrypt it. Granted, if the drive were decrypted by other means he would likely be let out of prison because the point of holding him for contempt would be frustrated - but that does not mean that he was put into jail because the drive was not decrypted. Contempt is solely about defying court orders. If Alice gave over her half of the key, she would have complied with the order, therefore, there would be no grounds for contempt.

cwilkes 10y ago
How far can court orders go? Let's say he was a crooked accountant and the police couldn't understand his spreadsheet. Is he obligated to show him what he was doing? To me this is what the disk encryption is like. The cops can't understand how to read the disk. Is he obligated to help them? What if the pictures in there are encoded using a weird format? Should he be forced to produce a program to read them?
- danellis 10y ago
  How does the Fifth Amendment apply here?
dangerlibrary 10y ago
From the article: "Rawls, the government argues, (PDF) "repeatedly asserts that the All Writs Act order requires him to divulge his passcodes, but he is incorrect: the order requires no testimony from [Rawls], and he may keep his passcodes to himself. Instead, the order requires only that [Rawls] produce his computer and hard drives in an unencrypted state.""
- justinjlynn 10y ago
  Ah, yes... the legal equivalent of "I'm not touching youuuuu...."
- Natanael_L 10y ago
  That's like being forced to translate your own notebook written in code. Not my problem, get your own codebreakers to do it.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    It's different because you can't verify the authenticity of the custom hand-rolled cipher. This is a request for the accused to produce the keys only, not to do the work of manually decoding.
    - Natanael_L 10y ago
      In a way still testimonial. I must provide secrets that reveal information about myself. It is literally the same as ordering me to tell them how to make sense of the unreadable data. I'm not giving them a plaintext copy of something already existing elsewhere (assuming no unencrypted backups), but producing new information for them. And unless you used FDE with full authentication (AEAD), which almost nobody does, there's nothing that says that this particular ciphertext represents the exact plaintext I've had at any given point in time. With XTS mode (Truecrypt) you can cut and paste together different blocks from different ciphertexts under the same key for as long as they're in the right positions. Depending on how much you know about the computer and if you've got access to multiple backups, you can splice together something that even if it doesn't contain anything illegal, it would look suspicious and incriminating. Consider for example LE getting your full file version history of a container from Dropbox. And revealing the keys is a kind of testimony that you have had read/write access to the drive, and that it indeed is encrypted (not just random).
    - mejari 10y ago
      Isn't the grandparent quote stating the opposite of what you've said here?
ArchD 10y ago
There's no observable difference between inability to produce a result and refusing to produce a result. How do they know he didn't just forget the password? Or that the password was recorded somewhere that he no longer has access to? After sitting in jail for many months, it is very easy to forget a password that you no longer use regularly.
- sjy 10y ago
  There's also no directly observable difference between killing with or without intent, which is why we have murder trials. The ability to decrypt data can be inferred from the surrounding circumstances, which is what happened here[1]: > The defendant did not testify at the hearing and did not offer any other evidence or testimony in support of his contention that memory failure prevented him from complying with the court's order. On September 14, 2015, the court issued an order granting the government's motion, App. 6-10, finding that Doe was engaged in a “deliberate ruse” in claiming memory failure as to the external hard drives and that he intentionally disobeyed the court's orders directing him to decrypt the devices. [1] Government brief, p 12: https://arstechnica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/fedsrawls.pdf https://arstechnica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/fedsrawls....
  - throwaway7767 10y ago
    Yes, the court system exists precisely to determine fuzzy things like this. I'm still curious, what kind of evidence or testimony might be considered believable in this case. Whether someone remembers a particular sequence of words and symbols seems like a thing that's very hard to determine, and by its nature it's unlikely there is any evidence either way. From the quote you give (and I'll admit I have not read up on this case beyond the article, so it's possible I'm missing something), it sounds like he claimed he didn't remember the password, the court responded with "I don't believe you because you haven't proven that you don't remember it, so have fun in jail until you decrypt." How would you prove, if you were brought into court, that you don't remember a specific password?
    - sjy 10y ago
elif 10y ago
I wonder if he had an encryption scheme that deleted the data in the event of n password failures and also something of legal value like bitcoins on the drive. Perhaps, then he could argue that knowingly attempting to log in using potentially incorrect passwords constitutes undue harm.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- contravariant 10y ago
  Such a scheme could probably be circumvented by making copies of the encrypted file (or the entire disk), or denying the decryptor write access etc.
0x445442 10y ago
What if the fellow made a sworn statement he doesn't remember his credentials? It happens to me on a regular basis. IIRC, the I don't recall defense has worked wonders for others in the past.

cwilkes 10y ago

How far can court orders go? Let's say he was a crooked accountant and the police couldn't understand his spreadsheet. Is he obligated to show him what he was doing? To me this is what the disk encryption is like. The cops can't understand how to read the disk. Is he obligated to help them? What if the pictures in there are encoded using a weird format? Should he be forced to produce a program to read them?

danellis 10y ago
How does the Fifth Amendment apply here?

dangerlibrary 10y ago

From the article: "Rawls, the government argues, (PDF) "repeatedly asserts that the All Writs Act order requires him to divulge his passcodes, but he is incorrect: the order requires no testimony from [Rawls], and he may keep his passcodes to himself. Instead, the order requires only that [Rawls] produce his computer and hard drives in an unencrypted state.""

justinjlynn 10y ago
Ah, yes... the legal equivalent of "I'm not touching youuuuu...."
Natanael_L 10y ago
That's like being forced to translate your own notebook written in code. Not my problem, get your own codebreakers to do it.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  It's different because you can't verify the authenticity of the custom hand-rolled cipher. This is a request for the accused to produce the keys only, not to do the work of manually decoding.
  - Natanael_L 10y ago
    In a way still testimonial. I must provide secrets that reveal information about myself. It is literally the same as ordering me to tell them how to make sense of the unreadable data. I'm not giving them a plaintext copy of something already existing elsewhere (assuming no unencrypted backups), but producing new information for them. And unless you used FDE with full authentication (AEAD), which almost nobody does, there's nothing that says that this particular ciphertext represents the exact plaintext I've had at any given point in time. With XTS mode (Truecrypt) you can cut and paste together different blocks from different ciphertexts under the same key for as long as they're in the right positions. Depending on how much you know about the computer and if you've got access to multiple backups, you can splice together something that even if it doesn't contain anything illegal, it would look suspicious and incriminating. Consider for example LE getting your full file version history of a container from Dropbox. And revealing the keys is a kind of testimony that you have had read/write access to the drive, and that it indeed is encrypted (not just random).
  - mejari 10y ago
    Isn't the grandparent quote stating the opposite of what you've said here?

ArchD 10y ago

There's no observable difference between inability to produce a result and refusing to produce a result. How do they know he didn't just forget the password? Or that the password was recorded somewhere that he no longer has access to? After sitting in jail for many months, it is very easy to forget a password that you no longer use regularly.

sjy 10y ago
There's also no directly observable difference between killing with or without intent, which is why we have murder trials. The ability to decrypt data can be inferred from the surrounding circumstances, which is what happened here[1]: > The defendant did not testify at the hearing and did not offer any other evidence or testimony in support of his contention that memory failure prevented him from complying with the court's order. On September 14, 2015, the court issued an order granting the government's motion, App. 6-10, finding that Doe was engaged in a “deliberate ruse” in claiming memory failure as to the external hard drives and that he intentionally disobeyed the court's orders directing him to decrypt the devices. [1] Government brief, p 12: https://arstechnica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/fedsrawls.pdf https://arstechnica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/fedsrawls....
- throwaway7767 10y ago
  Yes, the court system exists precisely to determine fuzzy things like this. I'm still curious, what kind of evidence or testimony might be considered believable in this case. Whether someone remembers a particular sequence of words and symbols seems like a thing that's very hard to determine, and by its nature it's unlikely there is any evidence either way. From the quote you give (and I'll admit I have not read up on this case beyond the article, so it's possible I'm missing something), it sounds like he claimed he didn't remember the password, the court responded with "I don't believe you because you haven't proven that you don't remember it, so have fun in jail until you decrypt." How would you prove, if you were brought into court, that you don't remember a specific password?
  - sjy 10y ago

elif 10y ago

I wonder if he had an encryption scheme that deleted the data in the event of n password failures and also something of legal value like bitcoins on the drive. Perhaps, then he could argue that knowingly attempting to log in using potentially incorrect passwords constitutes undue harm.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
contravariant 10y ago
Such a scheme could probably be circumvented by making copies of the encrypted file (or the entire disk), or denying the decryptor write access etc.

0x445442 10y ago

What if the fellow made a sworn statement he doesn't remember his credentials? It happens to me on a regular basis. IIRC, the I don't recall defense has worked wonders for others in the past.