Student Jailed For Refusing To Decrypt Data For Investigators

Send the drives to the NSA while he's in there, let him out on probation after they've cracked them open, that'll make a good example.
 
Aluisious said:
You guys suck pretty hard at understanding simple sentences. Why do you think it was a matter in an APPEALS court in the first place?
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You suck at understanding how courts and case law works.

The point is that it has been deemed, on multiple occasions now, that production or a password or the acknowledgement of a password's existence with regard to an encrypted set of data is covered by the 5th Amendment.

This passes into case law and, given similar circumstances, should be upheld in any court of law. Unless of course the judge is an idiot, which has been known to happen.

In this case, were it in the US, the investigation has the intent to show evidence of wrongdoing as there ARE NO CURRENT CHARGES (FTA) DUE TO LACK OF EVIDENCE. This kid would be absolutely covered by the 5th Amendment in the US and would have no legal obligation to comply.
 
wow uk...you guys can't look at porn, you can't encrypt your chit, in conclusion, uk kind of sucks?
 
fixedmy7970 said:
wow uk...you guys can't look at porn, you can't encrypt your chit, in conclusion, uk kind of sucks?
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Yeah, they may have very little freedoms and few rights even when it comes to self-defense, but on the plus side at least the payoff is that they have one of the lowest violent crime rates in the world.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ry-Europe-Britain-worse-South-Africa-U-S.html

article-1196941-05900DF7000005DC-677_468x636.jpg


Oops, I meant HIGHEST... :eek:

The US by contrast has had a falling violent crime rate every year for the last three decades along with relaxed regulations and increased protections for self-defence (such as castle doctrine), and we are now at a paltry 466 crimes per 100,000 residents, less than 1/4 the rate of the UK.
 
Ducman69 said:
Yeah, they may have very little freedoms and few rights even when it comes to self-defense, but on the plus side at least the payoff is that they have one of the lowest violent crime rates in the world.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ry-Europe-Britain-worse-South-Africa-U-S.html

article-1196941-05900DF7000005DC-677_468x636.jpg


Oops, I meant HIGHEST... :eek:

The US by contrast has had a falling violent crime rate every year for the last three decades along with relaxed regulations and increased protections for self-defence (such as castle doctrine), and we are now at a paltry 466 crimes per 100,000 residents, less than 1/4 the rate of the UK.
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lmao. and australia recently released some data regarding the effects of confiscating all their citizens guns...the result? huge increase in crime, robbery, home invasion. truth is, more responsible citizens legally carry arms, is a good thing both to deter criminals, and perhaps gov tyranny. anyways this is off topic.
 
DiabloRojo said:
You suck at understanding how courts and case law works.

The point is that it has been deemed, on multiple occasions now, that production or a password or the acknowledgement of a password's existence with regard to an encrypted set of data is covered by the 5th Amendment.

This passes into case law and, given similar circumstances, should be upheld in any court of law. Unless of course the judge is an idiot, which has been known to happen.

In this case, were it in the US, the investigation has the intent to show evidence of wrongdoing as there ARE NO CURRENT CHARGES (FTA) DUE TO LACK OF EVIDENCE. This kid would be absolutely covered by the 5th Amendment in the US and would have no legal obligation to comply.
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Don't let reality disrupt your idealized little mental model of the court system. You want to bet that this isn't going to be an ongoing issue in the courts?
 
I am of the mind that being forced to hand over passwords is a violation of the 5th amendment here in the US (this was in the UK, where the is no 5th).

If I can take the 5th (or remain silent) if they ask "where is the body?" or "where did you had the murder weapon?" then why can I also not refuse to incriminate myself by telling them how to get the evidence to do so?
 
I have a dozen dead bodies in my underground bunker. Cops have a search warrant for my bunker.

I don't have to give them the key, because I'd be incriminating myself?
 
Frankie said:
I have a dozen dead bodies in my underground bunker. Cops have a search warrant for my bunker.

I don't have to give them the key, because I'd be incriminating myself?
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No you don't, but than can blow the doors if you do.

Just like they can try decryption of the data via brute force without passwords.

It is just the latter is way harder to do.
 
Earth to little shit, you ain't an American and the UK ain't 'Merica. You have no Constitutional rights. Next time life in a free country. :eek::p
 
His crime was not possession of illicit pictures or content.

It was the disrespect of authority. (I'm making wavy hand gestures here)
 
Racheakt said:
If I can take the 5th (or remain silent) if they ask "where is the body?" or "where did you had the murder weapon?" then why can I also not refuse to incriminate myself by telling them how to get the evidence to do so?
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You can do whatever you want. Whether or not it's a 5th amendment violation is up to the courts to decide, while lower courts may have gone with the direction of no violation, higher courts tend to see it as a 5th amendment violation. It will keep being like this until SCOTUS has a case on it.
 
sfsuphysics said:
You can do whatever you want. Whether or not it's a 5th amendment violation is up to the courts to decide, while lower courts may have gone with the direction of no violation, higher courts tend to see it as a 5th amendment violation. It will keep being like this until SCOTUS has a case on it.
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Ya it is a risky thing. It is a tough call, and I see both sides, I just err on the side of the individual against the government.
 
xX_Jack_Carver_Xx said:
Earth to little shit, you ain't an American and the UK ain't 'Merica. You have no Constitutional rights. Next time life in a free country. :eek::p
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Earth to arrogant prick, other countries have constitutions just like the US and many countries have freedoms you can't even imagine.
 
Oldie said:
You should not be forced to testify against yourself, which in my opinion covers this. He also could have genuinely forgotten the password.
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It's the UK man. I'm not so sure where those poor folks are headed any more :(
 
I sense we need a new type of encrypted hdd and software. One that accepts two passwords. One that opens up the info like normal and a second password that when used melts the drive.

Would solve a lot of issues pertaining to this subject.
 
Ducman69 said:
Yeah, they may have very little freedoms and few rights even when it comes to self-defense, but on the plus side at least the payoff is that they have one of the lowest violent crime rates in the world.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ry-Europe-Britain-worse-South-Africa-U-S.html

article-1196941-05900DF7000005DC-677_468x636.jpg


Oops, I meant HIGHEST... :eek:

The US by contrast has had a falling violent crime rate every year for the last three decades along with relaxed regulations and increased protections for self-defence (such as castle doctrine), and we are now at a paltry 466 crimes per 100,000 residents, less than 1/4 the rate of the UK.
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What do they consider a violent crime? Incarceration rate is highest in the world in US. US holds 25% of the world's prisoners.
 
Frankie said:
The point is, to be analogous to HDD encryption which could functionally be unbreakable, they're unblowable.
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True, but I (personally) think that no person should be forced to assist in their own prosecution.

In the case of an hypothetical unbreakable door, they need search for the key with a warrant, you are under no obligation to tell them where the key is IMO.

I always wonder why people with weed in their car consent to search as much as they do.
 
tikiman2012 said:
The 5th amendment applies to all things in the U.S.. You are told directly when taken into custody that you have the right to remain silent. It's in the Miranda Rights. If you are ordered by a judge to give the passwords for things then anything that is obtained can not be used against you as it is a clear violation of the 5th amendment.

You are right though. With the way these judges nowadays blatantly ignore the law, it would take a higher court to take care of it.
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tikiman, if you are correct then please explain the difference between a judge ordering you to provide an encryption password so that law enforcement can search your hard drive for evidence of a suspected crime, evidence that was already strong enough to warrant prosecution. And a judge issuing a warrant for law enforcement to to search your home for physical evidence of a suspected crime.

I think you are wrong and there is a Judge here in the States that found her own unique way around the entire problem.

“I conclude that the Fifth Amendment is not implicated by requiring production of the unencrypted contents of the Toshiba Satellite M305 laptop computer,” Colorado U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn ruled Monday.
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http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/federal-judge-orders-defendant-to-reveal-pgp-password-to-law-enforcement/

She didn't order the defendant to give up the password or to testify in any way. She only ordered that all files on the computer must be surrendered to the court in an unencrypted format. The same thing is done in civil and other cases all the time and has been for decades.
 
There is no evidence that it was him who made the threats though.
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Really? They just plucked some smuck off the streets with no evidence at all and put him on trial. Those Brits are harsh :rolleyes:
 
LeviathanZERO said:
Did you just point to a wikipedia page as a rebuttal to hard evidence from the eff page?
From your link:


The same precedent that he linked from eff.
So you just proved his point. The Feb 2012 case set the precedent. It is unconstitutional.
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OMG, I can't beleave you think the EFF is an unbiased source of information. I am not saying they don't post accurate information because much of it is. But it is also biased and only there to support their agenda. This is no more credible a source then a Wiki page as cherry picking what you want to post and excluding what doesn't fit your agenda can be just as misleading as false information, even worse because if everything on the page that is presented checks out then people tend to see credibility where it does not exist.
 
B00nie said:
Yep, just he chose to encrypt his data and not reveal the password, you know, because he is so obviously innocent to any crime. :rolleyes:
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I remember a case a few years ago where the Feds broke down the door of a family and pulled their underage son out for distributing kiddie pr@n.

They grabbed the hard drive and found all kinds of stuff stuck on it hidden in really deep directories.

The family obviously hired experts to counter the evidence. They found the computer was infected with all kinds of RATS including relay and ftp servers.

The Prosecutor trying to save face reduced the charge to unlawfully accessing adult material (because he was a minor) and that would in turn, still label him a sex offender.

Seriously...WTF?

The fact is today, the number of vulnerabilities pushed today to exploit computers makes the general user base vulnerable to such bastard programs. Since hard drives are so very very very large, it's easy not to notice these things going on.

It would be akin to border patrol arresting a truck driver for finding drugs attached to one of the cars he's transporting from a factory in Mexico. He was just the unwitting mule.

While the chances of this happening to you are very very small, you still have a right to protect yourself.
 
Earth to arrogant prick, other countries have constitutions just like the US and many countries have freedoms you can't even imagine.
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I don't know.

I can imagine quite a lot :D
 
Here's an interesting article...with hints at what the Supreme Court would do.

http://blogs.denverpost.com/crime/2012/01/05/why-criminals-should-always-use-combination-safes/3343/

In part due to the government’s efforts to “collect it all,” strong disk encryption is a necessity in the 21st century. But cryptography has always played an important role in American life. As EFF’s Cindy Cohn testified before congress, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton “viewed cryptography as an essential instrument for protecting information, both political and personal.” Madison and Jefferson even exchanged encrypted drafts of the Bill of Rights.
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Serpent said:
He's technically right. The password thing should be protected by the 5th amendment and miranda laws, since what you said can be used against you, and basically be self incriminate.

Not that the courts aren't trying to force you anyway. Laws, are all good and all, by when the "interpreters" interpret them in the way that suits them, laws are useless.
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Which mean nothing in the UK, where this incident occurred.
 
DigitalGriffin said:
I remember a case a few years ago where the Feds broke down the door of a family and pulled their underage son out for distributing kiddie pr@n.

They grabbed the hard drive and found all kinds of stuff stuck on it hidden in really deep directories.

The family obviously hired experts to counter the evidence. They found the computer was infected with all kinds of RATS including relay and ftp servers.

The Prosecutor trying to save face reduced the charge to unlawfully accessing adult material (because he was a minor) and that would in turn, still label him a sex offender.

Seriously...WTF?
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Or a recent case of an underage boy, sexting his underage girlfriend - they're getting a warrant to inject this underage boy with Viagra so he gets a boner, to photograph this underaged boys penis, to show to a jury to compare to the sext. Yeah, this is real.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/virginia-teen-picture-sexting-case
 
Racheakt said:
...

I always wonder why people with weed in their car consent to search as much as they do.
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Because they don't know any better. I'm of the personal belief that at least half of the people convicted for crimes would have gotten away with it if they had just shut the fuck up.
 
lcpiper said:
tikiman, if you are correct then please explain the difference between a judge ordering you to provide an encryption password so that law enforcement can search your hard drive for evidence of a suspected crime, evidence that was already strong enough to warrant prosecution. And a judge issuing a warrant for law enforcement to to search your home for physical evidence of a suspected crime.

I think you are wrong and there is a Judge here in the States that found her own unique way around the entire problem.


http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/federal-judge-orders-defendant-to-reveal-pgp-password-to-law-enforcement/

She didn't order the defendant to give up the password or to testify in any way. She only ordered that all files on the computer must be surrendered to the court in an unencrypted format. The same thing is done in civil and other cases all the time and has been for decades.
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Serious statement, what if you actually don't know the password.

I actually have a good idea for a service that would do such a thing, allow you to gain access to encrypted files without actually knowing the encryption password. General idea is that it would work as such: You sign into an account on a the service provider that stores your passwords for you, so you literally could pound on the keyboard and make a 200 character password, something random that you literally don't know. When you login to the system, your password is presented to you. You copy/paste it into your disk encryption of choice.

To prevent the service provider from having the key or the ability to provide the key to law enforcement the provider is storing a hash based on a public key encryption. The application takes it's data block from the service provider, and runs it's cypher on it, and that is how the key is presented. They key is deliverd to the application via a secured channel (SSL/AES tunnel, etc). Also, the key at the service provider is stored on a keep alive based system, meaning you need to log in every say 7 days to keep your account alive. If you fail to login in a timely way your account is automatically and securely purged from the system in an unrecoverable manner.

It this way you could quite literally not know your password. If you were in custody then by action of the courts you would be unable to access a computer to renew your account, so in a very real way the court would be putting you in a position where you would be unable to furnish the information.
 
lcpiper said:
Really? They just plucked some smuck off the streets with no evidence at all and put him on trial. Those Brits are harsh :rolleyes:
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Yup, and they were foiled by the good old "It wasn't me but some other computer wise ass that happens to be using the same network AND hate the same people in a public verbal manner" defense.
 
...and the fact is, if your choice is 6 months for obstruction vs who knows what for the evidence convicting you of a more serious crime, you'll have the biggest smile in that prison for six months.
 
Serious statement, what if you actually don't know the password.
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The Judge either believes you, or doesn't and it really is that simple.

If the Judge believes that it is reasonable that you don't remember the password then you are off the hook for providing it, trial continues without.

But if the Judge doesn't believe you, well you are in for a very different experience.

Either way, in the end it isn't even about the Judge believing you. It's how the Jury reacts and if they believe you. It's fair to say that if you don't convince the Jury, then you are going to be pretty fucked unless the only evidence that reasonably links you to a crime is on that hard drive.

Of course most people get charge with several different charges, not just one. Even a relatively simple crime can result in numerous charges and the all may be represented by different types of evidence. It becomes rather plain to see that if you are in turn found obviously guilty of other charges related to the crime that the judge and the Jury may not be so believing that you forgot your password.

It does become a sort of case by case thing you see.

As for your service idea, sure, start it up. Maybe you'll be the next Mark Z.

Or....

Maybe the same stupid people who don't know to "just shut the fuck up" as Commander FAT says, won't be worried enough about their computer data to bother. Shit man, how much weed would they have to do without to pay for that shit anyway.
 
TwistedAegis said:
Or a recent case of an underage boy, sexting his underage girlfriend - they're getting a warrant to inject this underage boy with Viagra so he gets a boner, to photograph this underaged boys penis, to show to a jury to compare to the sext. Yeah, this is real.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/virginia-teen-picture-sexting-case
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Actually it looks like they did get the warrant but decided against actually following through with their plan when they start to get some blowback from folks about privacy rights.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/07/10/virginia-police-back-off-plan-to-take-explicit-photo-teen-in-sexting-case/?intcmp=latestnews

So, me being a "glass half full" kind of guy this is actually good news all the way around. Although the prosecutor looks like he's a dumb ass, the system worked as it should and things played out properly. This is not an example of a fucked up system, it's an example of a system that can correct itself as long as people care enough to do what's right.
 
lcpiper said:
Actually it looks like they did get the warrant but decided against actually following through with their plan when they start to get some blowback from folks about privacy rights.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/07/10/virginia-police-back-off-plan-to-take-explicit-photo-teen-in-sexting-case/?intcmp=latestnews

So, me being a "glass half full" kind of guy this is actually good news all the way around. Although the prosecutor looks like he's a dumb ass, the system worked as it should and things played out properly. This is not an example of a fucked up system, it's an example of a system that can correct itself as long as people care enough to do what's right.
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Ah, good, I expected as much. So while it is good in this case, how many ludicrous propositions do prosecutors come up with that don't get the publicity? Honestly, I hate how the DA system works here; purely a political stepping stone, so prosecutors look for feathers in their cap in wins, rather than actually judging if cases actually matter.
 
Ah, good, I expected as much. So while it is good in this case, how many ludicrous propositions do prosecutors come up with that don't get the publicity? Honestly, I hate how the DA system works here; purely a political stepping stone, so prosecutors look for feathers in their cap in wins, rather than actually judging if cases actually matter.
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I know what you are saying but I see it a little differently. I don't see it as a weakness in the system, I just see human weakness. I really don't think you can create a system that removes or completely nullifies the impact of humans being what they are. Unless we want to replace them with robots and we have all seen IRobot.

I think the that the best we can do is create a system where humans have recourse to seek fair judgement and hopefully fair treatment from their fellows. We have to hope that overall there are more decent humans then asshole humans. Ethics, character, a little moral courage, these all are part of it and make it possible. It means we will never get rid of the scumbags, and scumbags will continue to do scumbag things to good people. But we can deal with them. Just sucks when they get elected President.
 
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