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Merely Cloaking Data May Be Incriminating?
n0g writes "In a recent submission to Bugtraq, Larry Gill of Guidance Software refutes some bug reports for the forensic analysis product EnCase Forensic Edition. The refutation is interesting, but one comment raises an important privacy issue. When talking about users creating loops in NTFS directories to hide data, Gill says, 'The purposeful hiding of data by the subject of an investigation is in itself important evidence and there are many scenarios where intentional data cloaking provides incriminating evidence, even if the perpetrator is successful in cloaking the data itself.' That begs the question: if one cloaks data by encrypting it, exactly what incriminating evidence does that provide? And how important is that evidence compared to the absence of anything else found that was incriminating? Are we no longer allowed to have any secrets, even on our own systems?"
What about using a rare file system? If I want to put all of my stuff on ZFS and the FBI can't read it will they ship me off to Gitmo?
"Are we no longer allowed to have any secrets, even on our own systems?"
Why do you even have to ask? As private citizens we arent allowed to hide anything from the government. Its labeled as obstruction of justice and we get tossed in the can if we dont cough up the keys. Even if we have nothing to hide.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
And when I use a custom filesystem the FBI doesn't have drivers for, what is that?
No it doesn't. It raises the question. Begging the question is a logical fallacy, much like circular reasoning.
Or fascist America, depending on which side of the pond you live.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
Doesn't it say that refusing a search can't be used as evidence of guilt? Isn't this the same thing?
I was flipping bits on an abacus, newb.
If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear!
May the Maths Be with you!
We can't find out what you're hiding, when you hid it, or even if you did it yourself, so instead we're gonna just assume you're guilty of obstructing the course of justice, imprison you for that, and in our other investigations just pretend that we found some really incriminating stuff there. Idiots.
" Are we no longer allowed to have any secrets, even on our own systems?"
What? Why would you even ask this question after reading the quote above? All the provided quote says is that knowing that you tried to hide something is useful to an investigation. If I can figure out what sorts of things you do not want me to see that can be a big hint about what you are trying to hide.
For example, if you are being investigated and are found to have taken extensive precautions to encrypt your instant message logs but not your email then I might suspect that your most important communications used instant messages, even if I cannot recover them.
Are they still our systems these days? I could've sworn the EULA said it was just a license I bought...
Absent any other damning evidence (other concrete evidence found at the defendant's house, financial records at banks and such pointing straight to the suspect, witness testimony, etc), the prosecutor is pretty much fscked if he thinks a jury (dumb as they may be) is going to buy any counter-argument to even a halfway cogent alibi. Everyone knows that Windows is insecure. Everyone knows someone who got a virus. Everyone knows that identity theft is a Bad Thing(tm).
Sorry, but I somehow don't see how a whole case could hinge on just one bit of evidence: "well, he has an encrypted filesystem, and he keeps invoking the 4th/5th amendments(?) in order to not unlock it, so you must convict..."
Then there's the whole "evidence of absence is not absence of evidence" bit.
Not much left to be useful after all that...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
And the police expect total control of any given situation. Whenever one does not cooperate with the police, the police no longer is in total control and will take whatever measures are necessary to regain total control.
Adding those two points simply will make that anyone who hides stuff from the police is automatically an ennemy that has to be controlled at once.
As a matter of fact, one cannot never win against the police. In a courtroom, yes, maybe, but not against the police.
So the obvious solution is that everyone should perform maximum obfuscation/encrypting of data, the idea being that one cannot jail a whole country.
Suppose I left a DVD at a friend's house, and neglect to mention to the cops when they raid my house. Later the friend hands it over as part of the investigation. Is it really incriminating that I didn't tell them about it? Does the 5th amendment cover it?
If I encrypt my financial data, and am unable to unlock it for the FBI because I lost the smart card I used to encrypt it, does that make me guilty of . When asked why I didn't delete it, I could say I hoped to one day find the smart card. Does that mean they can ship me off to gitmo?
Of course the difference between this scenario and one where someone merely claims to be unable to decrypt the data is irrelevant.
I thought that we were innocent until proven guilty in this country, not vice versa.
Look, if you're obeying the law, then you have nothing to hide, and shouldn't hide anything. It's that simple, and I don't understand why people have an issue with it.
That, at least, is the sentiment expressed to me from new immigrants to the US from other countries that are not so free. I'm not xenophobic, but sometimes I do fear for the fundamentals of the US when people who do not grow up here say "we have too much freedom" and "we should be required to carry identity cards (papers)."
This is the same as saying, "He took the 5th! He must be guilty!", but that argument doesn't hold water.
You can't use someone taking the 5th as "incriminating evidence".
They can't make you testify to your password, if revealing your password incriminates you.
IANAL.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to encrypt personal data.
The cops go to a judge and get a warrant based upon whatever evidence they have that a law was broken.
They'd have to have access to it already to see that it was encrypted. And that access should require a warrant.
Again, see the word "warrants" there?
Encrypt EVERYTHING to protect yourself from regular criminals.
But if you are accused of a crime, you have to decide whether the encrypted data will help your case or harm it. And if it will harm your case, will it do more or less harm than refusing to decrypt it?
But there has to be a warrant. Focus your complaints on situations where there aren't any warrants.
this is so bollocks, i use a serpent-twofish-aes algorithm to conceal my personal info in the event my machine is ever compromised, and even having nothing to hide you can bet i wouldnt give the police the keyfile ... id fight it tooth and nail in court and when i win id launch a civil suit :)
I will arrest the whole govenment for all their illegal activity. I mean, if they won't show me classified documents, that's evidence that they have illegal writing on them, right?
hell yeah I'm posting this as anonymous coward!
So, if you're being investigated, and you're hiding data pertinent to the investigation, of course thats criminal. Its just like physical evidence: if you have it, and you're hiding it from the authorities, they're obviously going to throw the book at you.
And that, 'Are we no longer allowed to have any secrets, even on our own systems?' line is pretty sensationalist. Thats like declaring that it will soon be illegal to own a safe because a court issued a search warrant of someone's house.
For many years I've run hard crypto on my workstations (CFS). Beyond that I keep various files individually encrypted and use encrypted email and even remailers on occasion. Even if I were to hand the feds the keys to some of these systems, they'd be stuck wading through a system with several years of cryptic notes to self, experimental code, temporary data and encrypted files I've just plain forgotten to password for because they aren't important. How do I know they won't grab some random fragment of a random file, take it completely out of context and present it as evidence that I was up to no good? Do you really want a prosecutor presenting fragments of your browser cache and forcing you to explain why you were investigating say... the chemical reaction involved in creating bio-diesel 5 years ago? And if he only presents a fragment of that, are you going to know it was bio-diesel or will the jury draw their own conclusions based on the 'meth' in methyl alcohol? So go ahead and run hard crypto and refuse to give out the keys. If it's between the constitution and a prosecutor who is judged on his conviction rate, I'll stand on the 4th and 5th.
A couple of 30-somethings embark on the ultimate roadtrip
First off, the linked article doesn't actually contain the quote given in the article summary. But, assuming what the article summary says is accurate...
The relevance, admissibility, or incriminating character of the mere fact that a defendant hid something (i.e., as separate from the hidden content) is a legal question. In general, the absence of evidence is irrelevant with a few exceptions (obviously it's highly relevant to charges of destroying evidence!). The most important one is that of an absence of regularly kept business records. So, if a business regularly kept records of, say, who entered a building, and an employee were suspected of stealing something from the business, and the records for that night were missing, then perhaps that could be used as evidence against the employee on the theory that the employee had erased the record to cover his or her tracks. The same would be true if the record, rather than being deleted, had been encrypted when the others were unencrypted or encrypted in a different way/with a different key.
This is a very glossed over view of a complicated topic, but on the narrow question of the mere fact of the use of encryption, I would tend to say that would generally not be incriminating. Certainly the prosecution cannot simply point to your TrueCrypt or FileVault encrypted drive and say "look! everything on that computer is encrypted, therefore we can't know what it is, therefore it could be evidence of wrongdoing." That is tremendously weak circumstantial evidence and falls far, far below the reasonable doubt standard.
Note: I am not a lawyer and this is a layman's opinion, not legal advice.
Trust your govenment.
This is why you need to encrypt everything as a matter of course: the valid argument is privacy in the face of all the data theft reports coming out nearly daily, you don't know where stuff is stored all the time, so just encrypt everything.
Anything you *do* want hidden, needs to be done in such a way that there's nothing that indicates that there *is* anything hidden, ala Truecrypt's multiple volumes. "I don't need to *hide* anything, so I'm not using that feature, it's just a good encryption tool"
Encryption itself is only useful for preventing data theft by clandestine means. Authorities with a warrant can threaten you with jail to make you give up the keys, and even less scrupulous forces can beat them out of you. You can destroy the keys, but then you'll really piss them off.
What you need is deniability, as in a steganographic filesystem. No one can ever prove that there is even anything there -- "Oh, I was just playing with it, I can reformat it if you want." Even better, embed data steganographically in standard data formats, like images.
It would be interesting to interpret the protection against self-incrimination to include data storage, i.e. your hard disk is an extension of your consciousness. Of course, this does not accord with the original aim of this right, which was to prevent false testimony/confessions induced by torture -- your hard disk exists apart from your "will."
And with how quickly my posts are being modded up/down, I could use the polarity change as a new source of clean energy!
Slashdot is truly the breeding ground of new technologies.
Man.. you think they'll have a problem w/ the tattoo of the US Constitution I have on my ass in the Caesar cipher?
Yeah, let's vote for the guy who believes that cross-burning is free speech* and that there shouldn't be a separation from church and state:
"Cross burning could be a crime if they were violating somebody's property rights,'' he said during his campaign. But if you go out on your farm some place and it's on your property and you put two sticks together and you burn it, I am not going to send in the federal police."
"The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers. On the contrary, our Founders' political views were strongly informed by their religious beliefs. Certainly the drafters of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, both replete with references to God, would be aghast at the federal government's hostility to religion. The establishment clause of the First Amendment was simply intended to forbid the creation of an official state church like the Church of England, not to drive religion out of public life."
Great candidate you have there.
* free speech ends when it's purpose is to terrorize others.
And if you do have that warrant, I am going to read it, and unless it specifically requires you to give up my keys, I am going to tell you to fuck off.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
IANAL but the article seems to be talking about purposefully cloaking the data in a way that still allows it to be eventually uncovered. So it would seem to be that you can get in trouble for hiding "evidence" if they figure out that you hid it and recover it. If you're using good encryption then they can't even FIND the data, let alone recover it to show that you were hiding evidence.
/. stories, the submitter seems to be making up a situation that doesn't have much basis in reality or in the original submitted article.
Like most
If you want to keep a secret, keep it in your head. Writing it down is a mistake. The law against self incrimination only applies to whats in your head, not what you write down. Even in code. Even better than keeping a secret is never letting anyone know you are keeping it.
Encrypt everything, hide everything. Then they can't point to this-or-that encrypted file and say that that's the one that must contain the incriminating evidence. The fact that most people do indeed only hide stuff when they "know they're doing something wrong" only helps the bastards build their cases.
Liberty in your lifetime
While languages DO evolve over time, simply using a phrase incorrectly is not evolution, even if the mistake is common.
Furthermore, when you start multiplying the meanings that a word or phrase can have, you start reducing its usefulness. When it cannot make a specific idea clear, in contexts where the meaning may be ambiguous one now has to use even more words to get their idea across.
Anyway, this specific mistake has been pointed out many times on slashdot. Zonk really should know better by now.
You could claim it wasn't your doing, you were a victim of Ransomware...
The article states, "That begs the question."
Sorry, it does not "beg the question." Begging the question is a type of logical
fallacy. The term is not synonymous with "raise the question."
Get a clue. Get a life.
Similarly, if the cops accuse you of murder and you don't tell them where the bodies are, that proves that you are guilty.
And here I am, believing that it's my right to burn two sticks on my private property! Oh please, spare my simple soul from your gulags.
There are over 36 million lines of COBOL code in the world, and they are all raping children.
Really what the hell has happened to Slashdot over the last few years?
... On-Line". This story barely passed the "subject matter" test, but many other stories in this section fail even that test.
(Now this isn't flamebait, a troll, or off-topic [because the quality of the story is always on-topic]. You may not like what I have to say, but it is heart-felt and contains more truth than you may want to face up to. [Yeah, Truth to Power, that is it.])
Slashdot used to be a good technology related website. "News for Nerds" Now, it is conspiracy theory central.
It is obviously the editors fault. I eagerly await their book review of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion".
If your grip on reality is that tenuous, go over to Kos to find out how Tillman was OBVIOUSLY killed because he was about to meet Noam Chomsky.
I know, I know. Controversy equals pages hits equals advertising dollars. But at some point you get too out there and drive the punters away. Like I am about to. Save the flamebait stories for the Windows/Linux flamewars.
I had to block the Politics stories because that isn't what I want out of the technology site.
I had to block the Science section because it because Creationist Central (meanwhile the San Diego school system is setting up Muslim prayer rooms and gender separation, but that is OK).
And then, Your Rights On-Line is quickly becoming Politics under a different heading. Yeah, until they put the comma in there it really shouldn't be "Your Rights,
Yeah, I have tried to do my bit by meta-modding things as "unfair" as often as possible. But, the flood of immaturity and politically based mods in overwhelming.
I am really running out of sections that are free of the conspiracy theories, GroupHate, and the Daily Hate (really wish the people screaming about 1984 would have read the book). I think we are down to "Games", "Development", and "AskSlashdot". But at least "Games" and "AskSlashdot" have their own issue, which are currently tolerable but threaten to go off the rails.
Even then some bullshit conspiracy theory like this should have been blocked by the editors. Have we totally infantilized the entire world? If you can't separate one brick in a wall of evidence and circumstantial evidence (versus corroborating evidence) from a Vast Right Wing Consipricy, you need to go back to your parents and ask why they didn't teach you to be an adult. When I was a child I got angry because the telephone didn't give me a pre-paid envelope to pay my bill. As an adult I have a better expectation of how the world works and what it does not owe me. No jury will convict on the basis of an encrypted disk alone. When the IRS comes after you for unpaid taxes, you don't have to tell them where all your records are, but if you don't they have the right to come up with a guess and submit that guess to the jury. Same thing here. The prosecution gets to make a guess as to the contents of the encrypted disk. The jury may or may not buy their guess.
Plus the story itself is long on rant and short on any type of facts. That is OK in a post, but I expect better from the editors. The whole story is a troll.
I guess I'll end this with a question, what sites are out there that are what Slashdot used to be (circa 1998-ish)?
I encrypt everything just so if they ever investigate me, for whatever stupid reason they might decide to, they can demand the key and I can refuse. It's the principal of the thing. Why should we give up our privacy? What if I just want to encrpyt files by a random one time key and then erase the key? Maybe that constitutes digital art to me.
I encourage everyone to generate files containing nothing but random noise, encrypt those files, and throw away the key. If everyone does this then they can't tell what is a real encrypted file and what isn't. For good measure email some of these random files back and forth with suspicious subject lines.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
If I encrypt something and memorize the key, can the government compel me to tell them what the key is, or can I refuse to answer the question based on the 5th amendment?
paintball
There is a concept in the law called spoliation of evidence which may apply in such situations. Evidence may be presented to the jury in many jurisdictions that evidence was intentionally destroyed by the defendent. If it is proved beyond a doubt that evidence was destroyed, the judge can issue an instruction to the jury that they may, using a permissive inference infer that the evidence or data that was destroyed was harmful to the defendant. The instruction is permissive, in that, the jury doesn't have to find that the evidence destroyed was harmful, but the spoliation instruction is often a very powerful tool for prosecutors to use. It reminds the jury that evidence was destroyed and allows them to infer that that evidence was harmful to the defense in making determinations as to whether the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt to all elements of the crime they are charged with.
You obviously are using a shadow account to mod down your own posts. We knew you were doing something wrong, and now we have the proof!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
If you have a physical safe in your house, are you legally required to open it if the cops ask you to? If you don't, can the cops use that as evidence against you?
The right way for law enforcement to treat encrypted data on a disk is to treat it the same as a combination safe (with the password being like the combination to the safe)
If all the laws cover 7000 pages, how can a cop that barely has the qualifications of a mcdonalds burger dude remember all 7000 pages
especially if the lawsyers themselves cannot know it all.
Face it, if they dont like you, they just arrest you, its easier, they dont have to think at all.
Enough innocent people have been burned by cops with psychopathic brains.
Just look at those cops in NY who say, "you cannot film me thats againts the law" but they know there is no law saying that, they
just like to scare people.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
If I whisper something to someone, wouldn't that give them probable cause to suspect I'm doing something that's illegal?
"Cross burning could be a crime if they were violating somebody's property rights,'' he said during his campaign. But if you go out on your farm some place and it's on your property and you put two sticks together and you burn it, I am not going to send in the federal police."
And here we see just how desperate you liberals are getting, grabbing at any straws you possibly can to smear candidates you disagree with and paint them in ways that can only be described as defamatory. How pathetic.
But then, if there is no other evidence it is not likely (not impossible, but unlikely) that they would be looking at your disk drive to begin with.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Bitter about something, are we?
Except their partner on the beat. And Dispatch. And the Chief. And...
I don't think they do, realistically. They might want that, but doesn't everyone? I know I'd love to have total control of any given situation.
But realistically, any cop who has been around awhile should have seen the FBI take over an investigation, or a perp slip away because someone was stupid enough to violate their fourth-amendment rights. Or a good friend die in the line of duty.
If, in the course of investigation, they come across someone hiding stuff, it might make them suspicious. It might even automatically make that person a suspect. But "suspect" doesn't mean "enemy", because they have to be willing to accept that they may have the wrong person. (That's not always true, of course -- sometimes they know they've got the right guy, but he's still a "suspect" until he becomes a "defendant".)
Erm... you just refuted your own argument.
I mean, even your grammar disagrees with you here: "one cannot never win against the police." Cannot never. That means it is impossible for someone to never win against the police. Meaning that at least once in your life, you will win against the police.
It's tricky to figure out what you mean by "In a courtroom..." If you're saying that it's possible to win in a courtroom, then you're right. If you're saying it's not possible to win in a courtroom against the police, you're dead wrong. There have been cases where, for example, a cop opened the trunk of some guy's car without a warrant, and there was a dead body in the trunk -- but since it was obtained through an illegal search, it could not be used as evidence. Which means that the guy walked. (Might have been on Law & Order, actually, but there have been real cases like that.)
If you can get away with murder on a technicality, because some policeman (in this case a policewoman, I think) didn't follow procedure exactly, I call that "winning against the police."
Wrong again!
First, everyone will not do this. I think you'll only really get a few zealots (like whatever morons modded you +5 Insightful), but let's pretend for a moment that every technically-minded person followed you.
Now, I don't care how many that is, but there are overwhelmingly more people who actually feel good about AOL (and Earthlink, etc), spend all day on Myspace, have no clue what an operating system even is, etc etc.
And before you say "one cannot jail a whole class of people", I'll point you to Germany, circa 1942 -- several whole classes of people were not only jailed, they were also enslaved and killed wholesale.
I don't mean to say I expect another Holocaust here. What I am saying is that if you really believe that a truly massive number of people using encryption won't be jailed in this country, then you should also believe that even the small minority who seriously uses encryption today should be safe.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
With TrueCrypt you can create a hidden volume within an encrypted volume with separate passwords. If pressured you give up the password for the outer volume where you put something mildly important so they...whoever they is in that scenario...think they got something.
What's really a shame is that anyone in the US has to even think in those terms. Sad world we have made.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Apparently an encrypted copy of my tax files makes me a suspect?
I can't see any judge believing that it's a bad idea to apply security to personal financial data.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
I had no idea Ron Paul had so much common sense. Thank you for enlightening me. I will have to investigate further.
There is no promise of Privacy in the Constitution, and even if there ever had been, we'd have ground that right down to a bloody stump by now with the growing power of technology on one side and the exploding power of government and big business on the other. It's hard to even say that in a world with accelerating technology and the ability to grow weapons of mass destruction in your own garage or basement, that there isn't some justifiable need for privacy to give way to greater security.
That said, Govenment and big Business have proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that they cannot be trusted to wield the power of absoute intrusion with intelligence, dignity, or even a modicum of good taste. Microsoft is planning to turn your personal computer into their data tap in your home, a private spy on your desk... and what about our government, just today, four men falsely accused of murder in Boston by the FBI (two of whom died in prison and two others who spent 30 year behind bars), just got record making settlements of $102,000,000.00 for malicious prosecution and false imprisonment. Are these really the folks you wants to be watching every atom of your transparent life day in and day out? God help you if it becomes in their political or financial interest to have you made into "Soylent" (pick a color.)
So if we're going to live in a transparent society, where every person is;
- Videod from the time they leave their front door to the time the get back in the evening,
- Having every network packet they send or receive deep scanned for content, ownership, recipients, and legality,
- Running a computer with hardware and software providing virtually total exposure to data collecting agent both benign and malignant,
- And ultimately where every appliance, every room, every space will be filled with intelligent sensors recording every action, preference,
habit, activity, and affiliation that any of us might have,
then we are clearly far overdue for the creation of a new Bill of Rights. We must begin to think about the implications of our technology, and how the clear and unbridled abuse of that power by a loathsome few endangers all of us. If the world is to become transparent, then we must be assured that the eyes that see us, are fair, impartial, and dedicated to the sanctity of our humanity, and our dignity. In short those eyes cannot be human. They can be programmed by humans (who are themselves seen transparently by all), so that the tools that insure our safety, our comfort, ease, and efficiency, aren't used against us by greedy, power hungry, or despotic men. The temptation for misuse is simply too great, we must relenquish the process of watching people to ever smarter machines who have been programmed to act in our best interest. We need to make the breaking of these laws or personal protections prunishable by the most draconian measures. We need to watch the watcher and perhaps even watch those. We need to give people the blessings of infinite information without robbing them of every last shred of their humanity.In the end, this may indeed be the greatest challenge of the twenty first century
Just set up a triple truecrypt partition and in the middle one put some cheap porn files. The real stuff goes in the third one.
[ standard truecrypt [ deacoy porn ] [ hidden truecrypt [ deacoy gay porn ] [ doubly-hidden true crypt [ secret spy stuff muahahahaha ] ] ] ]
I am only aware of one case were the presence of encryption software (PGP in this case) on the defendants computer was considered by the court. http://news.com.com/Minnesota+court+takes+dim+view +of+encryption/2100-1030_3-5718978.html/ 0505/opa040381-0503.htm /. at http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/25/00 19217
The article covering the case doesn't spell out what effect the consideration had on the outcome. It does, however, point out the conviction was based on the in person testimony of the victim, the defendants browser history (frequent searches for "lolita"), and frequently hosting sleep over for little girls.
You can find the result of his appeal at http://www.lawlibrary.state.mn.us/archive/ctappub
as well as the discussion of it here on
It would seem encryption or other methods for hiding data alone are not by their mere presence a sign of guilt.
In the case I mentioned above it seems the issue of having PGP was relatively minor in ultimate conviction of the defendant.
As for being ordered to turn over a key for an encrypted file, you can always claim you have forgotten. TrueCrypt as well as other programs offer plausible deniability with hidden encrypted volumes.
If there is information someone has hidden, then absent OTHER evidence of criminal activity, well that's just too bad. It's up to the prosecution or the police or whoever to find that other evidence. Putting prior restraint or casting suspicion on what anyone does with their own data because some day it might be evidence of something is just wrong. Our rights continue to be chipped away.
Why do you even have to ask? As private citizens we arent allowed to hide anything from the government. Its labeled as obstruction of justice and we get tossed in the can if we don't cough up the keys. Of course, if you use stegography, the whole issue of keys is moot. Store all your data as the least significant bit in photos - particularly photos that you have modified as art. They can subpeona your artistic porn collection. But they can't prove that there even is any encryption.
Oh, right, DRM isn't bad, because it has large, multi-national corporations giving large campaign contributions-- err, I mean, supporting it.
Once you understand the target audience, the meaning is entirely innocuous. He's talking to people who work for big dumb companies, the kind that use NTFS and commercial encryption that we know won't work:
But the real give away is "perpetrator". He's advising corporate people who know what they are doing is illegal. When someone blows the whistle or makes them a scapegoat, and the wrong doing is proved beyond a reasonable doubt, every step taken to cover ass is evidence of intent and knowledge. Without using as many words, the author is discouraging the use of his product for this purpose.
The morals of all of the above are a further condemnation of non free software, if not capitalism itself. A self interested capitalist will report and avoid immoral people. There's no honor among theives. The free software vendor, on the other hand, polite to paying customers and would never think of doing something like this.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
So, according to the morons on that court, even if you haven't actually encrypted any data, the fact that you had the tools to encrypt data was enough to judge criminal intent, sort of like possession of burglary tools. The problem, of course, is that encryption software has legitimate uses.
I wonder if any of those judges had Microsoft Office on their computers - if they did then they possessed encryption software and could be viewed as having criminal intent.
The important people just ask Bush to invoke Executive Privilege, and then they are free to obstruct any and all investigations.
Truly though, just because you encrypt something has no basic legal grounds of incrimination, it is just like locking up your house. However just as a subpoena could be issued to force you to open your house to legal officials, a subpoena could also force you to un-encrypt the volume.
Beyond that, they are really grasping at straws or are trying to see the world via the horrors the Bush administration has done to civil protections and liberties.
...none, zero. The theory is you have rights, the government treats ALL of them as privileges they bestow on you when and if they feel like it, with a thousand variations of nuances thrown in for good measure that they call laws, or edicts, or rulings or policy or findings or directives.
Name a so called right-I can find examples where they are violated routinely by government and their drooling armed lackeys. ex: "free speech" right->reality "free speech zones" "keep and bear arms" -> 10,000 firearms laws on the books, all enforced, with a few places allowing you a limited "permission" to exercise a right
and so on, all of them, the fifth amendment included.
The rational person will realize this and act and think and plan accordingly. And also stop voting in the D and R power sharing criminal cartel which has hijacked government and turned into....well, it isn't what the founders intended. Stop with the granting permission to the criminal political gangs, this would be a good first step, albeit I would make one single exception, vote on the ballot or write in Ron Paul, he is the *last* Constitutionalist left in the Federal elected government, he's the last non-liar, he's the last one not bought off or bribed off or *blackmailed* off, which a lot of them are behind the scenes. The civilian/paramilitary spooks and military intel and enthusiastic fedcops are masters at the honeypot trap, and also creating false economic or other records which they threaten politicians with to get them to play ball- "or else". They target the ones who aren't normal political crooks.
And I know this because I've known some of those guys, they'll tell you war stories after they are retired and drunk enough. Some think back and think it is funny, others are ashamed but put up with it because it was their job and pension, but I have heard too much of this from too many guys who don't know each other to think they are all lying about it, it just has the ring of authenticity to it which when you compare it to the evil stuff they do which we do find out about, just fits too well..
The fix is in, the highest possiblly connected crooks and murderers run this nation (this is called the rogue government or shadow government loosely), and have been since before they shot JFK and got away with it.
You all know the routine.
What?
Use truecrypt to make an encrypted volume. Put some porn images in there, and use stenography on those images.
Then do the same with some regular images outside, but put non-crucial information in them. They will think that you were just trying to hide your naughty images.
You will be baked, and there will be cake.
It appears you just read the headline and nothing else. The article doesn't elaborate much on the consideration, except to note that an appeals court ruled its inclusion as evidence was "somewhat relevant". The article does say:/ 0505/opa040381-0503.htm
"...Rather, Levie's conviction was based on the in-person testimony of the girl who said she was paid to pose nude, coupled with the history of searches for "Lolitas" in Levie's Web browser." It seems to be me he would have been convicted regardless of the PGP's presence on his hard drive.
You can find the complete appeals court ruling at http://www.lawlibrary.state.mn.us/archive/ctappub
So you are working with something under NDA, and you want to keep that data protected and encrypt it in order to keep the vendor happy. Now that professional courtesy for your business agreement is now evidence that you're a bad guy?
fifth sigma, inc.
I was once on the other side of this debate... I was a network administrator at a large High School. One day, a teacher brought a [school] laptop to me for some work, and I saw that he had installed a data erasing tool, the kind that's meant to zero out data after you delete a file in Windows.
This immediately prompted me to look at the system closer, and I found evidence, mostly in the form of thumbnails, that the teacher had been downloading and viewing child porn on the laptop. This was definitely a probable cause for me to investigate the laptop, since we owned it. I often wondered how this would hold up if it were a private laptop, or if the police could use that as an excuse to investigate a computer.
Cloaking data destined to be received by a Mulah in Northern Pakistan... potentially suspect
Cloaking data on my PC, means "What in the black smoking hole of purdition do YOU think YOU'RE doing???, Trying to read my personal DATA, on my personal PC, in my personal HOME, on my personal PROPERTY, without my personal PERMISSION... YOU and the rest of YOUR nosey FRIENDS can leave now, YOUR welcome, like YOUR last brain cell has EXPIRED!!!"
So, how long will it be before they simply make the act of hiding things a crime in and of itself?
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
Even if you encrypt your private/incriminating documents, many parts and hints of them remain. For example, application temp files, thumbnails, recently used lists, page file, clipboard, dead space in disk sectors, browser history, saved login credentials...
A solution I suggest is to first create an encrypted drive (such as with TrueCrypt) and install 'portable' Virtual Machine software on the encrypted drive, and run any application that uses your confidential data within that VM.
The result should be that any system data that changes as a result of using the private data would be isolated to the Virtual 'sandbox', which is wholly contained within the encrypted partition. Ideally, anyone who then obtains your hardware without your authorization won't even have any clues as to the nature of the hidden data.
Not perfect, unless the Virtual Machine was designed for that reason. I believe many allow sharing the clipboard, and may themselves get swapped out to the host machines unencrypted disk, But you may reduce the leaked information to a small fraction of the leaks from just encrypting your documents.
You'll also want to use an encrypted connection to a network proxy.
No, it begs the question. This usage is well-established, and just because you are too stupid to handle phrases having multiple meanings, even when it's painfully obvious from context which is being used, does not mean everyone else should have to change to accommodate you.
"I think this is a perfect question to ask."
/. I didn't RTFA before shooting my mouth off.
I agree, technically speaking all data is "encrypted", it's the strength of the encryption that varies. Are we to assume that if forensics can't understand it then it is automatically incriminating? - That's nothing short of "guilty until proven innocent", under that policy the suspect can be locked away until he gives the investigators the non-existant key to unscramble the random sequence of bits found in the free sectors of his HDD.
"Also, The linked article...."
As is the custom on
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Is this some steganography? I feel like there's a hidden message somewhere in there.
If you are a tech support contractor or if you specify systems or if you have any influence on people who set up systems, configure computers, write software... , then spread the word: encrypting or 'cloaking' your data, or whatever you can do to hide it, is an extra layer of safety from the bad guys. If 'your grandma' and all her friends use this technology, etc., it gets harder to say that people who want control of their own private information are de facto criminals.
I so love quotes. and I so didn't read the article. I hope that doesn't make this post more moronic than it already is.
I tested the waters once... I created a file called info.doc -- a few kilobytes of completely random data.
I put that file into a ZIP file with a 16+ character password.
And put that ZIP file into a ZIP file with a different 16+ character password.
And put that ZIP file into a ZIP file with a different 16+ character password.
That seemed enough -- and I sent it through my work e-mail to my gmail account.
I kinda wondered what would happen if they couldn't see the data inside my attachment.
And the consequences? Turned out nothing happened. But, now I can move data with 1000x the effort of a thumb drive.
Brilliant!
you can have all the secrets you want
they'll show up even when you don't want them to (your own from you, that is)
it's all one big secret, isn't it?
Nothing to be afraid of.
Theoretically, anything can be anything.
But that doesn't mean anything.
Worry about it, and someone somewhere is going to acquire something they value.
Realize it or not, there are people out there who get off in getting you to worry about stuff. As in...
Life is short. Death is certain. You probably don't have as long as you think you might.
There are people out there who want you to worry about stuff. It's "in style" to worry about stuff.
Perhaps in some alternate universe there will be a law passed that makes it a felony to encrypt BT traffic.
Who cares? It's an alternate universe.
OTOH, you might have some fun with a CP/M formatted disk - say an 8" or 14" disk from the 1980's with some rare interface.
Witholding evidence has always been a sketchy. But there should be a warrant in order for it to be considered a crime. Just because it is digital, it still has the value of any other physical evidence. So why is this news? Isn't this issue closed? I mean if the court asks you for evidence, you give them evidence. Simple. You are innocent till proven guilty.
It works like this...
The government, being a public institution, has to keep everything it does private. That's why you are not allowed to see their secret files.
But a citizen, being a private individual, has to keep everything they do public. That's why the government must be able to see your secret files.
Got it?
I am anarch of all I survey.
Today, the most common "cybercrime" is child pornography. It consumes the time of vast number of forensic professionals.
One of the most common excuses is "Oh, I don't know how THAT got there." The incredibly stupid have their collection in a folder called "Kiddy Porn". One step above that would be people with it "hidden" somehow. Immediately upon finding something hidden the excuse about not knowing it was there - downloaded by some mysterous popup, for example - goes out the window.
In this way, having hidden information on your hard drive is extremely significant. Because it shows intent.
The cross-burning thing, I would say, is the least of the problems with Paul. There's a legitimate argument over protected speech there (not that Paul doesn't have a rich record of being a racist asshole).
But, more importantly, Paul has a long history of aligning himself with neo-fascist, white supremacist and Christian Reconstructionist groups. This man wants a fundamentalist, Taliban-esque theocracy run by white men. None for me, thanks.
Sent from the iPad I found in your car.
And they are "Julie" and "Amero".
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
Folks the article has nothing to do with either the heading or the description.
The quote from McGill does not even appear..
somebody's got their wires crossed I think
"Cross burning could be a crime if they were violating somebody's property rights,'' he said during his campaign. But if you go out on your farm some place and it's on your property and you put two sticks together and you burn it, I am not going to send in the federal police."
You realise that "I am not going to send in the Federal Police" is not the same as agreeing with someone right? There are lots of things that I personally don't agree with like hate speech that I don't believe should be criminalised. Ron Paul is a libertarian, and he's trying to find ways to shrink the Federal Government. I disagree with him and libertarians in general on a lot of things but it is good to see Republicans questioning the sacred truths of US politics. And it's frankly sad that people are dumb enough to regard questions like this as being some sort of exam question where candidates are marked up for parroting conventional wisdom and penalized for questioning it.
* free speech ends when it's purpose is to terrorize others.
I'd say it ends when it becomes incitement. Criticizing a group should be legal, calling for people to kill members of that group should be illegal. A jury should decide whether hate speech crosses the line into incitement.
But the act of burning a cross or a flag is not in itself incitement. And provided extremist groups avoid incitement they should not be criminalized.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Or fire-safes? Minnesota is obviously confused about where to draw the line between a committed act of crime and personal protection. I for one welcome your new completely open society (I promise not to steal anything while I visit!).
Oh, what's that you say? This only applies to data stored digitally on my computer? Because it's somehow different then me locking up my financial records and other personal effects?
Idiots. Encryption is a locking system. Like a padlock, a dead-bolt, a keyed car door, ignition switch, safe. If they can't see that the poor fools should try living without locks for a few weeks to show they themselves don't have criminal intent.
Quack, quack.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the (supposed) good of its victims may be the most oppressive
as represented in most comments. There's a significant difference between actions that are generally useful and can also be used to hide information. There are a ton of those. Even if there is systematic behavior indicating those methods are applied only to a small set of information, that is not significant enough to claim that information is related to illegal activity.
Separate from this is those acts that *are not* generally useful, do not come about unintentionally, and serve to hide information. They are not evidence of illegal activity by themselves, but they do raise the awareness that you are intentionally hiding information under the assumption someone will try to find it, which may be very relevant if that data is later found to be involved in illegal activity. Creating a loop in an NTFS file system is designed to prevent a specific product from analyzing your hard drive. It is not necessarily very useful in, say, preventing a thief from accessing your data (which encryption does). As such, it's one piece (out of many necessary) of evidence that might be useful.
This kind of extra forensic data is particularly useful because, depending on the situation, you can claim in court you are not liable for data found on your hard drive. I had no idea those files contained child porn! But your willful obfuscation suggests otherwise.
Nun! V nz n gubhtug-pevzvany!
Ice Cream has no bones.
Did anyone point that out to the court?
--
Toro
You don't even need Office. How do you think a web browser gets your details across to a shopping site in a secure manner - magic fairy dust?
I wonder if he realizes that if a person has data to which he holds copyright on his hard disks, and then hides it, Gill's recovery software is then in violation of the DMCA anti-circumvention clause? His software is DMCA Grade-A illegal if anyone stores anything, no matter how trivial, that is his own copyright, is legal, and is deliberately hidden from this program.
Anyone with a legal background want to send this guy a "cease and desist" letter? }:^>
--
Toro
(c) 2007 *all rights reserved*
Eventhough there is no reason government should pry into your personal data, you should have nothing to hide from the law. Q: Exactly what incriminating evidence does that (cloaking) provide? A: Evidence of obstruction of justice.
You just convince everyone that "teh terrorists are gonna take away their freedoms". Then sit back, emit the occasional edict, and keep scaring them until the whole country has become its own jailers.
Have you guys looked into windows Vista? well i find so many processes running that pretty much a fed would have a cake walk on to track your activity.
try to turn the programs running off, i guarantee you will have some quirk or problem that makes you reboot and the program is fired right back up.
Vista is now being called the best forensics tool there is by lawyers.
TSS
koewh jksda 9vhs5 slc72 jd7dg 23d7d
djsdf 8sjsd fkask afjka dkadu iai4a
21390 djd89 23hj2 89dsj ksd78 uioq3
sd789 sdnmw e4jks d78sd n3jkl asdvn
sdf89 sdjw3 4mlwe 9sdal loi8g jfi78
sd89s djk33 89f78 wem1- 0vcjd 00+++
aldqq://8aha8.sw8qw.as-z9 00+++
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
"The purposeful hiding of data by the subject of an investigation is in itself important evidence and there are many scenarios where intentional data cloaking provides incriminating evidence, even if the perpetrator is successful in cloaking the data itself."
Yes of course because if you're hiding something - anything, even something unrelated to the crime that you're being tried for - then that suggests that you're guilty.
If you wear pants on a hot day then you're doing it to hide something. Yet I don't think anyone would suggest that your decision to wear pants should be used as evidence to convict you of a crime.
I was watching one of those cops TV shows. The police were following a car they wanted to search but the driver wasn't breaking traffic laws. As they pulled the man over I heard one of the cops say "He has a cracked windshield, that gives us probable cause."
I thought probable cause of what? A drug dealer? A criminal? Every computer on this planet has encryption tools on it. Mine does.
My Grandmother used to pray that an illness would not deplete her retirement savings. My generation needs to pray that they stay under the State's radar. I've also added to my prayers I be called to sit on as many juries as possible. It's one of the few ways I have to give insert some sanity back into the community I live in.
The point of a hidden partition is that you can't prove it either way, unless you actually unlock it with the key. So, without the key, I could say, "Yes, there's a hidden partition within this conventional TrueCrypt partition, but I'm not giving you the key!" or I could say, "No, there's no hidden partition," and you wouldn't be able to tell either way.
So, then, you *could* presume that there is a hidden partition --but then that would be on the same order as just presuming that I have something to hide just because I'm using TrueCrypt in the first place. If I don't actually have a hidden partition, and you go looking for one, you're going to spend a pretty long time looking. There's nothing more frustrating than looking for something to prove that it doesn't exist (bug-checking programming sessions, anyone?).
As a matter of course, I do set up TrueCrypt volumes at standard sizes that happen to be much bigger than I need --my usual is 680MB so I can burn the whole thing to a CD. I think all my financial files add up to about 100MB within the 680MB TrueCrypt volume. If you want to go looking in the remaining 580MB for some incriminating evidence --hey, knock yourself out.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Citizen, don't get caught looking suspicious.
Seriously, folks, we don't have habeas corpus anymore. So it's not hard to see an FBI agent say, "Don't want to incriminate yourself? Maybe turning you over to military authorities for an indeterminate stay in Gitmo until we have the time to get around to analyzing your machine could change your mind, ummmm?"
Encrypt the hard drive with a nice long, randomly generated key. Never look at the key or store it anywhere except RAM. When the police confiscate your computer, they unplug it and destroy the only copy of the key. "Sorry, your honor, I can't produce the key because the police destroyed it."
How would this play out in law? Could get prosecuted for destruction of evidence?
As stated this scheme has a number of flaws so feel free to refine it. For one, you would want a UPS to protect against data loss due to power outages. For another, it lacks in the plausible deniability area (e.g. "Your honor, I didn't expect the police to unplug-my-machine/open-the-case/etc. so I didn't warn them not to do that.").
Dear numbnuts:
Burning a cross is not the same as "burning two sticks". It's a symbolic gesture that has the purpose of trying to instill fear into another human being. It is an act that's purpose is to serve a warning to blacks: get in line, you are hated because of your skin color.
So fuck off with your notion that someone is against the mere burning of sticks.
Encrypt and plead the fifth!
To fall for+++ATH NO CARRIER
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Yeah, let's vote for the guy who believes that cross-burning is free speech* and that there shouldn't be a separation from church and state: "Cross burning could be a crime if they were violating somebody's property rights,'' he said during his campaign. But if you go out on your farm some place and it's on your property and you put two sticks together and you burn it, I am not going to send in the federal police."
In some sense, he is (or could be) correct here. While I in no way support cross burning and personally believe it crosses the line on free speech, Ron Paul's position is valid. Other expressions of free speech fall in various places on this gray belt, including flag burning, hanging the flag upside down, beneath other flags, flying the Southern Cross (which is not, incidentally, the "Confederate Flag", that is the "Stars and Bars," but it ended up being confusing on the battlefield), and a whole host of expressions of protest, or simply of opposing tradition. Drawing a line is not easy. As an example, the Southern Cross was displayed by someone in my school (a long time ago) in their dorm room. They had ancestors who died at Gettysburg. A black student was "terrorized" by this, and it erupted into a school-wide conflict. Do the emotions of the viewer trump those of the displayer? How about the swastika which is an ancient symbol of Jainism?
I think it is unequivocal, however, that once they cross the line from expression to action, or to specific or generalized threat of harm, that all of the force of the state come down on them.
"The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers. On the contrary, our Founders' political views were strongly informed by their religious beliefs. Certainly the drafters of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, both replete with references to God, would be aghast at the federal government's hostility to religion. The establishment clause of the First Amendment was simply intended to forbid the creation of an official state church like the Church of England, not to drive religion out of public life."
This is also arguably correct. The founding fathers littered the government process with Christian rhetoric and apparently thought nothing wrong with it ("God save the United States and this Honorable Court!"). The oath on the Bible in court is also traditional. This has come up in discussion before the Supreme Court justices on several occasions. There *is* no basis in founding works for that rigid separation. This is a separate issue from whether their *should* be such a separation. Even if we presumed that the country were entirely Christian (which it clearly is not), the extremes of belief and morality within just this one religion would argue for strong protections against persecution on the basis of religion. Establishing religious practice within the government de facto persecutes by making people of other religious stripes (or none) uncomfortable about participating in procedures or expressing different traditions, and this is the tack the Supreme Court has largely taken, except to preserve a small number of specific long standing traditions. This, however, is a development from the Constitution, not a strict adherence to it.
Great candidate you have there.
Personally, I don't know what candidate I endorse at the moment. All candidates have serious flaws. Their beliefs are not the problem per se, but their integrity and the degree to which they feel the need to impose those beliefs on others. That is the serious flaw with Bush II. He not only has strong beliefs, but accepts no others and any such professed beliefs are traitorous. Many of Ron Paul's Constitutional beliefs are a breath of fresh air after over a century of extreme federalism. Others are borderline but defensi
That sounds very much like the DMCA prohibition against DRM circumvention methods, with one very important difference: your data is yours, and what you do with it is your business. In the DMCA, circumvention utilities are suspect because they can only be used to take the locks off someone else's data. In this case, Mr. Gill is arguing that you aren't allowed to circumvent his software, and doing so is suspect, if not criminal.
I wonder if he realizes that if a person has data to which he holds copyright on his hard disks, and then hides it, Gill's recovery software is then in violation of the DMCA anti-circumvention clause? His software is DMCA Grade-A illegal if anyone stores anything, no matter how trivial, that is his own copyright, is legal, and is deliberately hidden from this program.
Anyone with a legal background want to send this guy a "cease and desist" letter? }:^>
--
Anonymous Coward of Slashdot
(c) 2007 *all rights reserved*
What if the encrypted content isn't "there"? If all you find is a few gigabyte of porn (the legal kind)? Yes, those pictures contain the private data someone might be hiding, but can you see that? With good steganography, nobody even sees that there is encrypted data.
The only goal achived that way is that someone who really has some criminal activity going, will start using better encryption. If it's forbidden to hide something, people will just start finding better ways to hide their stuff.
Laws aren't self serving. And they don't change anything in the long run. When you start creating laws that are supposed to make it easier for law enforcement, you make it actually harder. In this case, people will not only encrypt their data, but they will start hiding it too. Until now, you just had to crack the encryption, now you'll also have to search for the encrypted data first. It only adds another layer of work for you as the forensic reverse engineer.
What our lawmakers fail to realize is that people react to laws. They don't simply start abiding to them just because they exist. If they ignored and circumvented them before, they will continue to do so, if that means more work, so be it.
What's worse is that the border between criminals and law-abiding citizens is blurring. We get more and more laws that invade our privacy. And, dammit, I insist in mine. Yes, even and especially against the government, who I do not trust to put my interests above those of the various industries bribing it. If that makes me a criminal, so be it.
And behold, another criminal more in the world. Created by law.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Your honor, do you own a computer? Have you ever used that computer to view content on the Internet? The software you used to access the Internet contains encryption software. Criminal intent! Take him away!
I don't support Ron Paul, or like him, despite leaning towards libertarianism... yet: make with the links, please. No offense, I'm just not about to take someone's word on /.
But what if the encrypted files are disguised as innocent family pictures?
No police or judge can request a key if they don't know or cannot reasonably prove that a key exists. It's easy to imagine a mass adoption of steganographic tools where secret documents and communications are hidden inside irreproachable pictures. Similarly, tools like TrueCrypt can conceal encrypted material in a way that prevent its detection.
More on this issue in this post: More steganography ahead on the Clipperz online password manager blog.
IIRC, the bugtraq post said something slightly different. They said something along the lines of 'under certain circumstances the mere cloaking of data may be incriminating [...]', which makes sense when taken out of the context of a criminal investigation. For instance, if your employer gets a tip that you're looking at porn all day and then when looking at your application they find a loop that they can't search, that may be enough for them (and they're not bound by the same rules as LEO). I *think* that's what they were trying to say.
Either way, the more absurd point is that they expect the forensics examiner to detect this manually, which brings into question why you'd be using their software in the first place. Overall their response was pretty damn lame.
To me, that is so intuitive that it is blindingly obvious, and I have often wondered why governments don't understand that. There is little to be gained by playing a cat-and-mouse game of "who can beat who next" in terms of who gets disappeared versus who the next big leader of the 'rebels' is. Let the public decide how wacko those people are. In 99.9999% of cases the public will deal with the wackos; in the tiny percentage where those wackos may have a point, the society gains something. And in neither case is the society itself ever in any real danger.
But then, we've long since know that logic and reason have little to do with why anyone does anything...
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
Crap. So now picking up a woman by whispering sweet nothings in her ear is a crime.
Well here are my wrists, haul me to jail!
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
Perhaps, but if it happens on your property, then it's YOUR business, just as burning the flag is. This is a pretty simple metric.
If I burn a cross in my back yard, unless there is a burn ban in effect for dry weather, then it's my business. That simple.
that said, if someone does it in someone ELSE'S yard? Throw them in jail and throw the book at them.
Opaque housecurtains have been ruled unlawful evidence of hidden crime. Police will no longer require a warrant to break into any premises with opaque curtains, blinds or heavily tinted windows. Occupants will be arrested and charged immediately.
What's next? Opaque clothes potentially hiding drugs, weapons?
Because only criminals desire privacy.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
So if I have true crypt installed on my disk.... TrueCrypt has the facility to store encrypted data on the disk, such that if you do not have a password, you cannot even confirm that any data exists. If you use the disk without the password, you can accidently overwrite the encrypted data - it is not part of any file, there is no "reserved" space. When you put in a password, truecrypt can find the data and your access to the disk is handled properly. Then since there could be data encrypted on the disk, they can imply that there is. I downloaded TC out of interest. Having a laptop I would use it if there were anything more important on the laptop than holiday snaps, but does it mean I have nothing to hide. PS TC can layer, one password gives access to baby pics, another gives access to ??Whatever?? You must do backups as working on the machine without the passwords will overwrite your data.
http://davesboat.blogspot.com/
"Them": Reveal the key to your encrypted filesystem.
You: Ok, here it is.
"Them": I see you are only using less than 20% of the filesystem. Give us the key to your hidden partition.
You: There is no hidden partition.
"Them": I'm going to apply forcefully a rubber hose to your feet over and over again until you reveal the key.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
And exactly where do you see this written down? Can you prove these allegations? Or do you actually have a clue about what you are discussing?
Libertas in infinitum