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British Police Demand Access To Encryption Keys
flip-flop writes "In the wake of recent terrorist attacks, police here in the UK have asked for sweeping new powers they claim will help them counter the threat. Among these is making it a criminal offense for people to refuse disclosing their encryption keys when the police want to access someone's files." From the article: "The most controversial of the police proposals is the demand to be able to hold without charge a terrorist suspect for three months instead of 14 days. An Acpo spokesman said the complexity and scale of counter-terrorist operations means the 14-day maximum is often insufficient."
Worse than that, what happens if your friend is storing the encrypted information on your PC and you *don't have* the decryption key?
Are the police really going to believe "I don't have it, they're not my files"?
The real measure of a free, open and just society is how it behaves in bad times - not in good times. When difficulties arise and the authorities want sweeping powers to 'protect' the citizens, should the citizens give up important civil liberties for what is probably just an illusion of safety? When are you ever safe enough in these times? Maybe the citizens should stop and ask themselves how much they really value their civil liberties - just how far should you go? Maybe the citizens should not crow too loudly about how free, open and just their society is when they look back at how their country has behaved in difficult times..
Among these is making it a criminal offense for people to refuse disclosing their encryption keys when the police want to access someone's files.
I'm not familiar with British law, but I do know American law is based on the same doctorines as the British(from a historical perspective at least).
In the U.S. the court can order you to provide encryption keys and if you do not you will be held in contempt of the court. This usually means the judge puts you in jail until you decide to provide the keys. To me(IANAL) it seems like the above just formalises the practice. Via the wikipedia reference it appears as though the U.S. did this in 1981.
Being held in contempt of the court is a very normal tool for judges to use with uncooperative court subjects, cryptographic keys aren't special or different.
- "Never let a computer tell me shit." - DelTron Zero
Terrorist style attacks even happen in police states. Obviously, it impossible to lock things down far enough to give real security, therefore, there is no reason to destroy privacy in a vain attempt to get there.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
Then you'll be found to be aiding and abetting.
If you're holding data for someone that you don't know what it is or how to decrypt it, you will be perceived as an accomplice. Or, just summarily assumed to be the original source of the data and just recalcitrant.
Interesting to see would be if you can have your lawyer hold onto these things and have them covered under privelege.
It's scary that in so-called free societies it can become a crime to keep (possibly legal and innocuous) secrets from the government.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
He must decide on going to jail for something he is completely innocent of, or releasing potentially incriminating evidence on his friend
Because there's no friend like a friend who talks you into criminal complicity, I always say. I mean, what are friends for, if not to help you launder money or hide assets? And what ever happened to the bad guys just writing down the key, laminating, and burying it in a coffee can three paces south of the big oak tree on old man Smith's back forty? You know, where you used to go and smoke pot and dream of the days when you'd have enough ill-gotten assets to have to hide them from the court? Ah, those were the days.
Incidentally, what would you have the cops do while they're sitting there looking at the hard drive from a guy they just arrested, who yesterday was having some trouble blowing himself up? Ask him ever so nicely? OK, so he was willing to die in order to kill you and your kids, so he's probably not going to be big on cooperating, but the owner of the cyber cafe where he often runs chats with his equally inept fellow bombers - is it worth being able to crack his encrypted leavings so that maybe we can stop his buddies from smearing more innocent people all over the inside of a tunnel? You are aware that actual people are actually spending their days actually thinking up and acting on ways to kill people that run yogurt stores, work at rehab clinics, build web servers, teach grade school, and have families that depend on them... right? This isn't a game, it's actually happening. And as the prime minister of Autstralia put it so eloquently yesterday, we're using 19th century approaches to dealing with bad guys happy to use 21st century technologies (um, even as these twits condemn modernity - always a telling little bit of confusion on their part).
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
And how exactly would you know this?
From the PGP FAQ:
Sure it is unlikely, but unless you have some way of proving what you say, it would be unwise to believe that no one can / will in the near future be able to crack or intercept your encrypted messages.If you really want to hide something under the new rules, encrypt it and store it on a network of zombie computers, or a p2p network. That will cause real problems for others, but you'll never have possession to be charged with not providing the keys.
Or, just compromise your enemy's computer and store some encrypted files there and then turn them in as a concerned citizen. Even if they manage to get aquitted, the implied guilt during the process will destroy their lives. It's sort of scary if they're gonna assume you are the one who did the encryption simply because you possess the file.
There are a lot of people who're more comfortable with the monster we know. Hell, look at US foreign policy.
Islamic extremists are hardly the only people killing anyone in Iraq. Iraq was *not* a misogynist medieval theocracy under Saddam! Get your blind prejudice out of your ass and actually take a look around!
The US are not the good guys here. There aren't any good guys here. Especially when ignorant fucks like you spread this same diseased prejudice about the state of Iraq before the war, and especially before the sanctions. I half expect to start hearing people talking about the White Mans Burden. Current US policy is to play legal games so that we can torture and hold people in ways that should be illegal, but duck out through loopholes (gitmo, civilian (read: mercenary) "interrogation specialists", shipping suspects to Syria).
History will show whether or not the Iraqi invasion was better or worse for the country as a whole. I'm not prepared to make that judgement, and I'd pity our president for having made it if I thought the import of it actually touched him. The average Iraqi is substantially worse off today than he was before the invasion. Some (Kurds, most obviously) are much better off. Some are worse off but believe it's for the better and move on. A great many are just pissed off.
Are you seriously going to tell people that the US is better because we don't kill and torture as many people? Thats our big claim to fame as the moral guiding light who will bring true democracy to Iraq?
It's kind of amusing that we defended Brittain against the fascists sixty years ago and now we're encouraging them to adopt our fascism.
The US entered the second world war in the December of 1941, a full year and a half after the Battle of Britain in summer 1940. Hitler abandoned Operation Sealion, the invasion of Britain, when the RAF defeated the Luftwaffe for control of Britains skies during that long summer.
As the other poster says, you didnt defend us, you fought with us.
Chomsky's beliefs can be summed up quite simply. USA = bad.
That would rather be:
USA government = bad
and it is not a matter of belief but of fact. He doesn't tell nice feel-good patriotic stories of heroes and scoundrels but presents steel arguments and ice cold facts to make his case.
Do you have any objection to the facts? Can you point to an inaccuracy? Most likely not. Now if his views do not settle right with your feel-good ideas that is a problem you have to deal with...
Yam, yam, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade
Turn on the TV...look at the situation they were in. The only ones prosperous were the ones in power. That $$ (even the oil for food $$) went straight to Hussein and was not spent on food or upkeep of utilities. And don't do like the rest of the left and leave out all of the facts except the ones that support your case. He ATTACKED A NEIGHBORING COUNTRY. He left the oilfields burning when he realized he couldn't keep it for himself. He murdered so many they may never find all the mass graves. He fired upon allied airplanes in the no-fly zone more times than most people know. The list goes on and on.
If America cared so much about Hussein killing Iraqis, then why did they give him weapons to do it with? The United States never, ever, cared about the livelyhood of Iraqis. That's why they supported Saddam until he got uppity, and then (with the help of the UN) imposed sanctions that strangled the nation.
Don't give me a song and dance about how you helped free the Iraqi people by deposing Hussein. You helped subjugate them in the first place by propping him up.
Why were you propping him up? Because just a little while back, the other murdering dictator you propped up in Iran got overthrown.
Who else were you funding around that time? Oh, right.. your good friend Osama Bin Laden the freedom fighter.
Your country has its dirty, grubby little fingers all over the mess in the middle east. Why is that? Because the middle east has the substance that you need like a crackhead needs crack. You'll do anything to get it. You'll support dictators, you'll support terrorists, and you'll be friends with the country that the terrorists who attacked you came from.
And now I'm sure you'll be prepared with justifications for why it was OK for the US to support Saddam, and why it was OK for the US to support Osama - but then, people who do horrible things always have justifications for the things they do. Osama has a justification for flying planes into buildings full of civilans, and you have yours for supporting mass murderers.
But aside from tube junkies in America, few people in the rest of the world buy your story. You had an opportunity to show you had changed. You had an opportunity to gain the support of the world after 9/11. You blew it.
Have fun fighting your old friends.
-Laxitive
Check out Al Jazeera, if you can find it. Then you might see a sampling of what's really going on over there: shot after shot of dead civilians, including many kids. Many more shots of civilians, barely alive, lying in squalid hospital beds, the remains of their arms and legs wrapped in bandages after being blown off by bombs. Innocent civilians being harassed and humiliated at roadblocks, or worse if they panic and fail to comply with a shouted command they can't understand because it's in English.
You'll see footage of heavily armed US troops kicking in doors of houses, pointing their weapons at civilians, shouting (again in English!) at women and childen cowering in the corners and crying. You'll see picture after picture of abuse of prisoners in US prison camps and hear about people, most of them completely innocent even by admission of the US commanders, who disappear into them for years without charges, without lawyers and without any chance to defend themselves.
Every other day there seems to be yet another suicide bombing in Iraq that kills as many people as the one in London two weeks ago. That attack is still getting saturation coverage on the US networks, but the bombings in Iraq rate, at most, a brief mention each.
Arab culture is quite different from ours, and we can't assume they share our more abstract values like our Bill of Rights (that is, if we actually practiced them ourselves). But they belong to the very same species as we, so it does seem somewhat reasonable to believe that they, no more than we, like being killed or maimed or abused or imprisoned, or having that happen to our friends and families.
Still can't figure out why they hate us? Or are you going to tell me that all that footage is faked somehow?