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The legal system in the UK recognizes several rights against self-incrimination, but there is a carve-out for the per se crime of failing to disclose a key to e

• izzydata 3y ago
  I suspect the law is not intended to be logically consistent.
• kergonath 3y ago
  > How is this different than refusing to tell where you've buried the bodies? They can get away with it because it’s on a computer. The voters don’t care, and the MPs by and large don’t understand. Those who do would love the same principle to apply to the body case as well.
  • toyg 3y ago
    That's because the memory of truly oppressive governments in Western Europe has faded. People who don't remember history, are doomed to repeat it.
    • pengaru 3y ago
      I wonder if Berlin's society is already atrophying in this department.
      • toyg 3y ago
        Germans are actually the most inoculated against that type of virus, they will be the last to fall. They are at the forefront of anti-authoritarian efforts in technology, for example. US/UK/France, on the other hand...
        • P_I_Staker 3y ago
          [flagged]
          • dang 3y ago
            Yikes and whoa - you can't post this sort of nationalistic flamebait here. We ban accounts that do; it's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We had to warn you recently about breaking the site rules like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34887271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34887271. I don't want to ban you because you've also posted good comments - so would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on? We'd be grateful.
            • P_I_Staker 3y ago
              You may have a point about this one (the German one), but the comment about this site and silicon valley in general is vital feedback. This website is constantly in dire need of self reflection. We should be up in arms seeing people on this site patting themselves on their back so smugly. It's truly disgusting, and incredibly harmful to the fabric of society. There may be fine line to walk here, but I don't think I do well to sugar coat it... there's a reason I have quite a few upvotes for that comment, a bit more than I'm used to seeing. Others are also concerned and frustrated by this privileged rhetoric. Regarding Germany, yeah I may have gotten carried away towards the end of this comment. I could have given more reasoning or left out the part daring people to downvote or flag my comment. On the other hand, having recently visited Germany, I was very unimpressed. Their society has changed and is less prone the horrors of the 20th century, but culturally still very vulnerable to totalitarianism. I'm really torn now, because I'm not sure it's unfair to say it oozes from their pores. They have massive issues with intolerance, racism, and able-ism to this day. Honestly, it somehow seemed worse in certain ways to the USA. This stuff should be talked about. People should not believe the myth that German fascism is a thing of the past, that has been overcome.
              • dang 3y ago
    • andy_ppp 3y ago
      I do wonder if the masses always end up voting in fascists every 50 years or so simply because they forgot that there were some things worth fighting for. Does it feel like to anyone else we are on the precipice of extremely big changes that might not be good for anyone?
      • robswc 3y ago
        I think this is a big part of it. I remember growing up reading Harrison Bergeron (in school) and always thinking there's no way such a system would ever come about by the will of the people... yet SF proves people are all too happy to implement such a system (tearing down gifted students for the perceived benefit of everyone else). SSDD.
        • vkou 3y ago
          Of all the insane, repressive and straight-up authoritarian systems in the United States today, you picked... A failed pilot for middle-school algebra in SF?
          • cscurmudgeon 3y ago
            It wasn't just a failed pilot: It was a pilot which prevented advanced students from taking algebra. Lines up with Harrison Bergeron perfectly. And on top of it they claimed it was a success as failure rates went down. The failure rate went down because nobody was being tested. https://www.joannejacobs.com/post/algebra-for-none-fails-in-san-francisco https://www.joannejacobs.com/post/algebra-for-none-fails-in-... > The district had bragged that algebra failure rates had dropped. Families for San Francisco, a parent group, analyzed the data: Failure rates dropped after the district dropped the end-of-course exam.
      • Loughla 3y ago
        I don't think it's forgetting that some things are worth fighting for. I think it's that, after a fascist government is ousted via violence, people spend so much time and effort to demonize them, that Joe Blow on the street doesn't see them as 'Us' anymore. We would never make decisions like They made, so We don't have to worry if Our leader is a fascist. Our leader is nothing like Their leader was, other than in absolute power. Our leader has our best interests in mind. Their leader was just a power hungry madman. When we remove the humanity from the monsters, we fail to remember that we could be monsters, too.
    • cm2187 3y ago
      The absence of a strong constitution protecting fundamental rights is also an issue. With a 50%+1 majority, the house of commons can vote pretty much any law it wants with no counterpower.
      • toyg 3y ago
        The British system is, indeed, fundamentally insane, from a technical perspective. They nerfed aristocratic power by neutering the House of Lords, but didn't bother replacing it with some other check or balance, leaving the Commons all-powerful - and with an electoral system that disproportionately favours cohesive ideologic minorities. Ironically, this was largely done by self-declared leftists, who utterly failed to anticipate how fascism could easily manifest through such a system.
        • orra 3y ago
          > Ironically, this was largely done by self-declared leftists Eh, the Parliament Act 1911 was passed by a Liberal Government. > who utterly failed to anticipate how fascism could easily manifest through such a system. The Liberal Party, and its successor the Liberal Democrats, has long been in favour of electoral reform.
          • blibble 3y ago
            and the RIP Act was passed by a Labour government (and the Terrorism Act)
            • kevviiinn 3y ago
              From what I've heard, the UK Labour party does absolutely nothing for labor. They're turning into the US democrats
              • toyg 3y ago
                It's not that "they're turning", it already happened. Tony Blair and Bill Clinton shared political platforms almost precisely. A recent effort to go "back to their roots" (the Corbyn years) ended with a stalinesque purge of such leader. Sadly this leaves free reign for upstart neonazi and neonazi-adjacent parties (BNP, UKIP, Brexit Party/Reform UK...) to rip through traditional Lab heartlands.
    • zamnos 3y ago
      Ah! Not to worry, those who do remember history are doomed to watch others repeat it, so I think it's a bit of a wash in the end.
  • vintermann 3y ago
    The voters don't know. It has received very little coverage. From what I can see, only Guardian and BBC have covered it, and neither show it on the front page (for me) right now. Of cases they consider more important are the late Aaron Carter's drug use, a mystery spiral in Alaskan skies, Russian ships accused of spying in Norway, how to combine Ramadan fasting with fitness, potholes in Uganda to name a few.
• PeterisP 3y ago
  They're probably treating it the same as refusing to open a safe given a valid warrant; the rights against self-incrimination do not extend to protecting the contents of your safe, drawers, private letters, etc, and also to the contents of your smartphone.
  • OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    See, but if you refused to open a safe for the cops, their fallback would be to drill it, not incarcerate you for failure to disclose the combination. Under that precedence, the cops have the right to try and crack my phone's encryption, but not to compel me to give them my passwords.
    • namdnay 3y ago
      Because they have a fallback. I presume that if someone were to invent an uncrackable safe they would adopt the same stance as encryption
    • PeterisP 3y ago
      But they can charge and punish you for refusing to open the safe, that's obstruction of justice even if they could drill it and drilled it.
    • Karellen 3y ago
      > if you refused to open a safe for the cops, their fallback would be to drill it, not incarcerate you for failure to disclose the combination. Or, more likely, they would do both. They would drill it, and prosecute you for failing to comply with a valid court order (obstruction of justice, interfering with an investigation, contempt of court, or whatever...).
• Manuel_D 3y ago
  And perhaps more importantly, it becomes a de-facto crime to ever forget an encryption key. People forget the passkeys to crypto wallets all the time, losing millions. How can the police effectively prove that someone remembers the passcode? What if someone, after a few months in prison, says they've reconsidered and are willing to comply. They try to decrypt it but fail and subsequently say they the stress of incarceration has made them misremember the passcode?
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • blibble 3y ago
    > How can the police effectively prove that someone remembers the passcode? if they can prove you were using the phone an hour ago that would probably do it
    • negidius 3y ago
      The stress of being arrested and threatened with years in prison if you don't remember your passcode could very well cause someone to forget it.
      • blibble 3y ago
        the thing is it's not incontrovertible proof, it's "beyond reasonable doubt" the prosecution would show up with when you bought the phone, how many times you'd used it, that you used it 80 times in the last hour, and so on and it comes down to whether or not a jury would believe that you had really forgotten it (despite that evidence)
        • negidius 3y ago
          Which means that someone who forgets their passcode because of the stress of being arrested and threatened with years in prison could easily be wrongfully convicted. It's a horrible law, even for those who don't care about privacy.
• OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  I can definitely see how instead of viewing a device as an extension of a suspect's mind, you can view it as just another piece of property. If you had a dairy noting where you buried the bodies, or some receipts for your illicit arms deals, locked in a closet somewhere, the cops could reasonably break in and search it, or more relevantly compel you to hand over the key. Now, I definitely prefer the US's stance of a password being illegal self-discrimination, but I don't think it's unreasonable to have built legal precedent around that other view.
  • sdfghswe 3y ago
    > Now, I definitely prefer the US's stance of a password being illegal self-discrimination Is that true though? Never heard that before.
    • NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
      It's somewhat up in the air. The prevailing theory is that the 5th protects against compelling what amounts to testimony... but it's only been tested a few times in court, never by SCOTUS. With mixed results.
      • sdfghswe 3y ago
        Is there a way I can learn more about this? A resource for non-lawyers.
    • P_I_Staker 3y ago
      btw, I think OP meant incrimination
      • sdfghswe 3y ago
        I understood what he meant, and in fact I even missed the typo until you pointed it out.
  • beezle 3y ago
    Suppose the hypothetical diary were itself encrypted? And what if it was done with a one-time pad?
• PragmaticPulp 3y ago
  > How is this different than refusing to tell where you've buried the bodies? It would be more equivalent to refusing to let the police search one room in your house after they’ve established a reason to believe that you might be hiding bodies in it. > Why should the police be permitted to assume you're guilty and in possession of vital information under certain circumstances? They haven’t assumed guilt of the suspected crimes. However, if they have sufficient reason to believe that evidence of a crime exists in a certain location then they can compel someone to provide access to it. It’s similar to how the police can search your private property if they have sufficient evidence that a crime has been committed That said, I don’t know the standard of evidence necessary in the UK to get this far.
  • hiatus 3y ago
    Yes but your mere refusal to allow entry to a room is not grounds for arrest if the police already have a warrant and can search it regardless of your permission. Put another way, the police do not require you to produce the keys to the subject of a warrant, they will enter by force if necessary. It's perverse that technology is different only because the police have no means of forcible entry.
    • kevviiinn 3y ago
      >the police have no means of forcible entry. Technically they do as seen in the San Bernardino shooter case, it's just expensive
  • negidius 3y ago
    > It would be more equivalent to refusing to let the police search one room in your house after they’ve established a reason to believe that you might be hiding bodies in it. No, it isn't. The police searching a room in my house doesn't require me to do anything. They can even do it while I'm in a coma or dead. It's nothing like forcing me to tell them my passwords or any other information.
• GuB-42 3y ago
  It doesn't seem to be about self-incrimination. The way I understand it, they don't accuse him of being a terrorist, they are accusing him of having information about terrorists and refusing to release them. To follow your analogy, the police doesn't think you are the murderer, but they believe you know the location of the bodies and accuse you of covering for the murderer.
  • zamadatix 3y ago
    It's still self-incriminating to say you were guilty of covering for the murderer or, in this case, terrorist.
• sjtgraham 3y ago
  Which rights against self-incrimination? The right to silence has been gone since the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994.
• TacticalCoder 3y ago
  > Why should the police be permitted to assume you're guilty and in possession of vital information under certain circumstances? It shouldn't but... Tacitus, 2000 years ago: "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state". And we have oh so so many laws.
• MagicMoonlight 3y ago
  I can kind of see the logic in it. They’ve effectively been given a warrant to search your device and you are preventing that lawful search. It’s like if they were trying to search your house for the dead children but you say you’ve lost the front door key and accidentally put a forcefield around it. Did you really forget to deactivate the forcefield or are you obstructing justice?