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Anecdotally by the same judge who ordered a $5,000-a-day fine to Ladar Levison from Lavabit, back in 2013, until he provided the SSL private keys in electronic
by pera 8y ago
Anecdotally by the same judge who ordered a $5,000-a-day fine to Ladar Levison from Lavabit, back in 2013, until he provided the SSL private keys in electronic form (originally he printed them in 11 pages of 4pt text).
- wonderwoman3 8y agoOCR technology is obviously some unknown black magic for the high-profile government officials and their aides. Doesn't really surprise me though...
- crushcrashcrush 8y agoIt was clearly a punishment for acting like a petulant child.
- Bartweiss 8y agoIt's worth noting that Levison may not have been handing over written keys as an act of protest/petulance/whatever, but as a delaying tactic. He'd been looking for legal aid (and failing, because under a gag order he couldn't request non-attorney help finding it), and was in court without representation. Levinson was ordered to produce keys on August 1, and did so on paper August 2. It took until the 5th to get together a contempt charge and an order to surrender digital keys by the 6th. Honestly, the alternative doesn't make much sense. If he just provided paper keys as a final insult, expecting them to be used, why shutter the entire service when someone called him on it? Why then wait two days past the start of the fines to pull the plug? I'm not surprised that Levinson caught a contempt charge for printing the keys, although it's pretty ugly if he's right in his claim that he was denied a hearing to contest the charge, then denied appeal for his failure to contest it. But doing so seems less like a move to irritate people than a way to drag out the process without naked defiance.
- wilg 8y agoWhat? Ordering the person to turn over the information in a useful format is a way more sensible plan than OCRing it from text.
- wonderwoman3 8y agoNo. The latter is much more faster and efficient way. Also great way to say f you to the childish smart-ass person.
- astrodust 8y agoWhat kind of key is that long?
- AdmiralAsshat 8y agoHe printed all of the keys together so as to make them unreadable.
- qrbLPHiKpiux 8y agoI remember the day I tried to get my mail, it didn’t work, I went to the website and saw that cryptic message. Then a few days later... The news broke about Snowden.
- tuxxy 8y agoI wonder how far you can take the "electronic form"... Could you compress it, base64 it, hex encode it, then base64 encode it again (this time URL-safe), then hex encode it, etc? I wonder what kind of response that would elicit heh.
- tedunangst 8y agoSpoiler alert: the judge will not be amused.
- refurb 8y agoIndeed. If your goal is just to make the judge more pissed off and more likely to take it out on you, this is a great approach. If your goal is to help yourself, please don't do this.
- jjeaff 8y agoThe expert would say, "these keys don't work". Then the judge says, "you will remain in contempt until you provide working keys".
- Daviey 8y agoThat would still take only a few seconds for a reasonably competent investigator to reverse?
- cmroanirgo 8y agoA PDF of a low quality scan (without OCR!) using a cursive font is electronic... (I figure they court was a bit more specific than just requesting 'electronic'... surely?)