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Police Need 90 Days To Crack Hard Drives
Twyko64 writes "The UK police may need 90 days to hold terrorist suspects because it takes that long to crack a suspect's PC hard drive." From the article: "Combining the analysis, the translation and second stage analysis, add inter-country co-operation and interview strategy formation, and from the police point of view, the existing 14 days is inadequate and 90 days doesn't look excessive. Another factor is encryption sophistication. If 256-bit triple-DES or similar techniques are used then decryption could require supercomputer-levels of cracking."
They're really going to hate it when suspects start using steganography. Imagine having to brute-force decrypt, only to then have to search for a particular piece of straw in a haystack...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
If it's illegal to not provide the police with a key to encrypted data, why can't they just put that person in prison for that crime and decrypt the data at their leisure?
Who ordered that?
Psssh. That's gotta be a worst case scenario. In my experience, even people who are paranoid enough to encrypt things tend to be careless with their keys. I found one once where the guy had encrypted the hell out of it, and left a copy of the key in the default key gen directory. Some people just throw it in the trash, and then forget to empty the trash, or forget to secure purge it afterward, so the key can be recovered.
For big corporations and places that have enough staff to be able to implement a good crypto policy, I'd be surprised if you COULD crack it in 90 days. 256 isn't anywhere near as high as you could go if you were paranoid, and storing data that you didn't need to read all the time.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The UK police may need 90 days to hold terrorist suspects because it takes that long to crack a suspect's PC hard drive
I write this as a 'Merkin, so forgive if I don't fully "get" UK law, but...
At the point where the police would waste 90 days of supercomputer-level CPU power on cracking an encrypted HDD, wouldn't they already have enough other evidence to charge the suspect with an actual crime, and could just ask for that 90 days as a delay before the actual trial?
The idea of the police making people dissapear for three months at a time on a whim scares the hell out of me. Suddenly sarcasm, or wearing the wrong clothes, or "driving while black" becomes punishable by three months in prison? Time to invest in prison/industrial stock...
Where did it say that those using encryption are automatically considered criminals? They're suspected criminals who happen to use strong encryption
It was a century of answers and all of them have been wrong...
Wake me in a thousand years
Ouch. Technobabble at its worst.
a) Triple DES is 112-bit encryption.
b) If you are using strong encryption, like a 256-bit AES cypher, no number of supercomputers are going to 'crack' it, whether it's 14 or 90 or 900 days, unless it's a really bad implementation.
c) One would HOPE that the police would have evidence before they start impounding things. But this is about 'fishing' for evidence for 'suspected' terrorists. "You look like a terrorist, so we'll impound your things in the hope that we'll find something". So much for presumption of evidence (which I believe holds true in the UK as well.
Things like this make me sad. Just another way for the authorities to 'protect' it's citizens by making that sure they can see all and know all. Welcome to the Panopticon.
I hope not. Holding suspects for any amount of time without probable cause is bullshit. A hard drive whose contents is not decipherable (as yet if ever) is not probable cause. It is an unknown. If the police do not have reason to hold an individual aside from a hard drive of unknown content, the police have do not have reason to hold an individual.
I think the key to this article is not the piece on encryption, but the piece on inter-county cooperation. In the states, it takes a long time for evidence to be approved by the proper authorities for analysis, just because the people doing the analysis don't want to screw up and have the evidence thrown out in court.
And as easy as it is to make fun of the police's analysis methods, my guess is most slashdotter's don't even know what it's like to process evidence for a case. It's not just "running automated tools" on some suspect's hard drive. It's getting to know the case, knowing what you're looking for and where to look for it. Many times it's the police themselves that are writing these "automated tools", which only present the evidence in a way less technical minded officers assigned to the case can understand. And what happens once you get that evidence? You have to try to fit it into the puzzle of the case. It isn't CSI, where you find some email detailing the crime that's digitially signed and the suspect confesses to writing it. Often times its finding some random piece of partially-overwritten text and having to see if it fits into the overall case.
And yes, most digital forensic labs can analyze your precious reiserfs/ext2/ext3/whatever file systems. In fact, I've never run across a lab that couldn't. So don't think you're 1337 linux system will be safe if it's ever involved in a crime. And if they don't have the tools to analyze them, they'll contact a department that does. That's how the real world of forensics works.
Next time you want to talk about a subject you blatently don't understand, do us all a favor and don't hit the submit button.
Shami Chakrabati from Liberty made a very valid point. Holding someone for the equivalent of a typical 6 month jail sentence with no charge is a very good way to alienate that person and his/her community. How would we feel about losing 3 months of our lives, and after that, being released with "no charge". What would our employers think? What would happen to our houses, mortgages during that time? It's easy to think "90 days isn't so much", but think about what it actually means. Shami is great.
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Mod that comment up
If they don't have enough proof to charge someone after even a couple of days, why are they so sure someone is a suspect at all?
They must have some reason to arrest someone in the first place and I sincerely hope that reason is based on a collection of very compelling evidence. At which point they can charge him/her and have as much time as they want anyway.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
Encrypting a drive is enough for probable cause.
In the twisted logic of the law enforcement game, pretty much anything can be used as PC.
Put it this way, when I worked for the state AG's office all we'd need is the slightest whif and the next thing you know we would be hauling out paper records and computers, servers, etc.
And in the U.S. we have secret courts that will issue warrants with virtually no burden of proof. How do you like those apples?
As you say, these people have been arrested but not charged. The relevant point is that people should not be arrested without charge. For anyone who hasn't really considered it, 90 days is a long time and for anyone who has never been in prison, I would suggest it works on a similar principle to rape or a violent assault - it is a sudden message from another that they can do what they like to you and you can't stop them. Anyone who has been inside in a proper prison will at least understand where I'm coming from. I don't mean this as a disrespect to rape victims either. Being grabbed off the street and locked in a room, suddenly cut off from your friends and family can be a terrifying experience and the police don't need "torture" to scare you. Just being told you're going down for "terrorism" and they'll take the next fifteen years away from you if they so please? Just a few days can scar you terribly (google for the Stanford Prison Experiment). Ninety days? You don't want to go through that.
And all this, they can do just because they want to. They can do it to scare you, they can do it to punish you and they can do it all without any evidence at all. br
The thing that did my head in in the USA, were all the people who were convinced they're Irish. I'd get some guy there tell me in a pure american accent that he was Irish american? How are you Irish, mate? Were you born there? Do you have an Irish accent? Citizenship? Read Ulysseses? What?
In fact I met almost no actual americans, only hyphenated americans. When someone found I was from Europe, she introduced herself to me as a German-American. So I started talking in German to her and she didn't understand a bloody word. But she said her "Grandad would understand it." I met a guy over there from Mozambique. He said the thing that annoyed him most were people who said they were african-american. It pissed him off because they didn't know a damn thing about africa. It makes NO SENSE! If you're born and raised in America, you're american. Culture is not transmitted genetically and nothing that is makes a bit of difference to who you are.
So if the parent poster is born and raised in Ireland, then he can continue to rant about discrimination. If he's another hyphenated-american, I'm not interested.
And I'm Welsh, btw, and we're the Irish who couldn't swim. It's like anything else - if you let something bother you, people will use it. If you you're proud of who you are, they can't.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.