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Intentionally making your data inaccessible (by encryption or otherwise) without a means of recovering it to attempt to prevent it being used against you in cou
by B_ 15y ago
Intentionally making your data inaccessible (by encryption or otherwise) without a means of recovering it to attempt to prevent it being used against you in court could be considered destruction of evidence. If convicted of that, expect far more than a few days in jail, depending on how annoyed the judge is with you.
- gcb 15y agoHaving lost the key for several of my spare drivers in the closet... How can that power abuse you describe be avoided on innocents?
- marshray 15y agoBut it wasn't evidence when you encrypted it, right?
- Duff 15y agoTypically, you are in trouble when you destroy evidence when you has reasonable cause to believe that it is evidence. If I delete all of my email today, I'm not committing a crime. But if I find out that my company is being sued for breach of a contract that I was working on, deleting email becomes suspicious.
- encoderer 15y agoMy attorney has advised me that the best thing in this situation is to have a personal data retention policy: "I delete my email the first monday of every month." Then, do just that. If a civil or criminal case is brought against you the law says you must stop any routine houskeeping tasks like that to preserve evidence, but the most you'd have then is 4 weeks worth. Much better than 4 years.
- Rophuine 15y agoThe flip side is I escaped being charged with conspiracy to launder money because I had kept email from several years prior in which I complained at length to my manager about how a particular client was behaving, and then escalated it to his manager. Both managers were implicated, but I could show that I'd reported the behaviour and been reassured by two people who I trusted that nothing illegal was going on.
- Rophuine 15y agoActually, I should elaborate: if it were just two people I trusted reassuring me it was fine, I would probably have still been on the hook for contributory negligence. What got me off completely was the fact that the responses I got from the senior manager said that he'd passed all of my information on to the legal team, who'd been over it with a fine-toothed comb and decided it was all above-board. What got HIM in trouble was that he'd never passed it on to legal at all.