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UK Government Can Demand You Hand Over Encryption Keys
iminplaya writes "The UK government can now demand that citizens hand over their data encryption keys - or face jailtime for obstructing justice. The law only applies to data on UK shores, and doesn't cover information transmitted via UK servers across the internet. 'The law also allows authorities to compel individuals targeted in such investigation to keep silent about their role in decrypting data ... The Home Office has steadfastly proclaimed that the law is aimed at catching terrorists, pedophiles, and hardened criminals--all parties which the UK government contends are rather adept at using encryption to cover up their activities.'"
I guess when wire-tapping and CCTV just isn't enough
Unless we let the government have access to all our data then the terrorismists will WIN.
After all, if you've nothing to hide then whats the problem? I for one will be printing out all of my data in hardcopy to send to the government, as I am a PATRIOT.
After all - there was no terrorismisticals before the internet.
This law has been around for years. In fact, back when PGP was big, some UK residents on Usenet would have sigs saying something like, "If I revoke a key without explaining why, it is due to that law".
I'm curious to see how they handle hidden volumes on encrypted disks. Sure you can give up the first key, but if you don't give up the second (or the x-th, how far can you nest these?) who's to know?
12:50 - press return.
RIPA has had a lot of negative coverage since the idea was first raised. Someone at the time proposed emailing the Home Secretary with a few MBs of random data and the text 'here is the information on your opium import operation. The key is as we agreed' and then sending a tip to the police. If the Home Secretary does not disclose the key (which he doesn't have) then he is liable for 5 years of jail time. Or, the government could see how silly the act is and repeal it. Since the law just went into force, I expect civil liberties groups will start trying this soon.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If a judge asked you to hand over the keys to your house.. or your car.. or your safety deposit box.. you are legally required to follow that order....
Are we surprised that digital keys have the same requirement?
And as for all the other (physical) keys you can refuse and let the courts (and a jury) decide.
Encrypt using Truecrypt, which supports plausible-deniability. Allows you to have an encrypted volume and then a "hidden" encrypted volume within that. If you're ever forced to give up your key due to extortion or torture, you only need to reveal the key to the outer volume and the inner hidden volume remains encrypted.
Truecrypt hidden volumes
This is exactly the sort of situation that hidden volumes were created for. The government asks you to hand over your encryption keys? "Well sure officer, here's the key to my encrypted volume, but there really isn't anything on there besides some harmless porn (or anything else that might be plausibly embarrassing enough to keep hidden away)" Of course, it's probably only a matter of time before someone decides to make it illegal to possess programs that can create any sort of hidden volume, but that's another issue.
A terrorist/pedophile/whatever is arrested, and his computer is seized. The authorities demand the suspect hand over the key, or he will face obstruction of justice charges and a year in jail. Does he
a) Tell them to get bent, go to jail for a year as a symbol of government run rampant (face it, some "activist" will pick up his "cause")
or
b) Immediately hand over the key, which is then used to procure the evidence of his computer, putting him in jail for 20 years as an ACTUAL terrorist/pedophile.
That's not even getting into the situation if one is NOT an actual pedorist. Terrorphile?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
For private communications, don't send encrypted emails. If the encrypted email is captured by a wiretap, the fact that the ciphertext could be decrypted by the recipient is enough to allow the authorities to force that recipient to decrypt it.
Instead, you should establish an encrypted connection, use it to exchange private information, then destroy the keys after the connection is closed. SSH is one protocol that does this automatically. That way, although a wiretap can record the ciphertext, the authorities cannot retrieve the encryption keys because they no longer exist. Your democratic right to privacy is preserved.
I wonder if any instant messaging programs have implemented this? If so, do they consider the possibility of man-in-the-middle attacks as SSH does?
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
That's right, I seem to recall that Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman wrote about providing protection for pedophiles and terrorists in the motivation section of their paper on RSA.
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god." - Thomas Jefferson
Since part of the law prohibits telling anyone that you have had to hand over the keys, how can you be sure about that ?
"There are still people who think that freedom is too precious to be given to the people they are protecting it for. Damn."
The problem is "Freedom" is a very abstract concept that can be easily twisted to mean both opposites. Speeches by infamous dictators like Hitler and Pol Pot often feature words like 'Freedom'. Most of the time it's not that people wish to deny Freedom, but that they disagree on what freedom is.
i.e. Freedom to buy addictive drugs or Freedom from addictive drugs?
What if I don't have the keys but only store the data (i.e. I'm a backup service provider who stores data for people he doesn't even know by name or anything but IP address, which is fleeting at best)? What if I simply cannot remember the keys or, in case of keydisk/keyfile systems, have lost either (or destroyed because the archives are old backups no longer needed)? What if I don't remember which version of which cypher program was used to encrypt the keys (I tend to have that problem, actually, with a few archives...)?
I don't have a problem handing the keys to the authorities provided they can give me a good reason they need them (I really don't enjoy handing out trade secrets, you know...), but what if I just simply and plainly cannot?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Have an off-shore cron job to revoke your keys if you don't touch them often enough.
When you are asked for the keys, refuse until you are arrested and unable to save the keys from being revoked.
The revocation is the trigger that you have been asked.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
1. Place files full of random data on their machines
2. Tip off the authorities to their "terrorist plans"
3. Watch them get five years for "refusing" to decrypt the "data"
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
Yay! The Four Horsemen! But they forgot the Money-Launderers.
This reminds me, some guys had sent a PGP-encrypted email to the (Autstralian?) Prime Minister, then reported him to the police. His house was searched for the crypto keys; the next day the law project was put under the rug.
What are you UKsians waiting for?
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
Does the UK have the concept of a search warrant?
I know everyone gets their panties in a wad about the guvmint decrypting their data, but I'm somewhat okay with it if a court is involved in the issuance of a valid search warrant. It's not fundamentally different from the court-overseen right to come into your home and search the premises.
You can't completely declaw the police or they'll be useless at any type of law enforcement.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
You're saying, it's illegal to tell people what semiprimes the government knows the factors of?
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
This laws was implemented years ago. The article author seems to know very little about the law in this respect, especially as it has barely changed since introduction in its 2000/20001. Thankfully, it appears it has yet to be used in a non-terrorism related case.
:(
No, the law was *made* years ago. It has yet to be used because it first entered into force yesterday. Give them time!
The really evil part is that you can be forbidden from telling anyone that you were forced to decrypt your documents, under penalty of imprisonment. Without public scrutiny, this law is inviting abuse.
Paid Q&A/Research
Keep your encryption keys offshore.
You have the password to unencrypt your offshore keys. This password cannot be demanded of you (jurisdiction). But when you want to use your encryption keys, your application asks for the password, retrieves the key, and performs your data decryption (locally or remote?).
Decidedly more trouble than it's worth, but an interesting thought exercise.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
This is in fact very easy to prove:
If te maximum jail time for not divulging encryption keys is significantly less than the time for actually being convicted of terrorism, then it should be obvious that real terrorists would never divulge such encryption keys.
No, this law, and others like it in other jurisdictions, are simply there to give the police one more reason to force regular citizens to hand over their keys.
If you actually do have something to hide from the authorities, the best idea is probably to look into http://truecrypt.org/ and the capability of having hidden encrypted volumes.
When forced, either by legal threats or by rubber hose interrogation, you can then divulge the primary key. On the primary volume you should store potentially embarrassing, but not really critical information. This should be sufficient to show that you had reason to hide said info, but not enough to put you in jail for a long time.
If you happen to be located in a place like Myanmar/Burma, then you should also use TrueCrypt, for exactly the same kind of reason.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
I was wondering how the court would rule if your password contained information that would incriminate you in a different crime.
For example, if your password was: "my_murder_victim_is_buried_under_my_patio" or "I_embezzeled_20million_into_account_123456789", wouldn't revealing the password violate your right against self-incrimination (at least in the US)?
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
Yeah. The U.K. (along with most countries) has always impressed me as a country designed by the bureaucrats, of the bureaucrats, and for the bureaucrats. Unfortunately the U.S. has been heading the same way for a while.
People forget that the U.S. Senate came close to outlawing Public Key Crypto back in September of 1991. This is why there was a rush to release PGP back in the summer of that year. It negated anything the Senate could do.
One has to wonder what life would be like without public key crypto today, or the interest in it which the prosecution of Phil Z. spurred.
Two things which come to mind are Bill Clinton's Clipper chip, and a lot weaker Web-based business. And certainly not the ability to keep things private via PGP or TrueCrypt.
Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 26-36 are perfectly clear - the US can demand your crypto keys as part of discovery in litigation, end of story. Fed. R. Civ. P. 37 spells out what happens if you don't comply, and the basic idea is that you get the choice that Steve James offers the unnamed punching bag in The Soldier: "Duck or bleed." If you get served with a subpoena or ordered to comply with discovery, you can comply (duck) or resist (bleed).
Having said that, I'm immune. I have numerous files and directories on my computer that are encrypted with strong crypto and to which I do not have the password. I created them, assigned them random passwords that I never knew, filled them with random garbage that I never saw, and there they sit. I do not need to produce decrypted versions of those files or directories in court or anywhere else because they are not under my control.
So far, so good, but who cares about files with no useful information? I do. Ordinarily, the fact that there's a decrypted file on my computer establishes a ludicrously-hard-to-rebut presumption that I have "possession, custody, or control" of the data therein. (Fed. R. Civ. P. 34(a)(1)) However, because I can establish that I have many files and directories that are not in my possession, custody, or control (for decryption purposes), that presumption does not apply to me. The party seeking disclosure must establish, file by file, that I can decrypt the file. And that's damned hard to do.
A few notes: if you do this to circumvent judicial process, you're not going to get away with it. The judge is just going to allow the other party to draw the worst reasonable inferences about the contents of the file and force you to rebut. I, however, am not doing this to circumvent the law; I am doing it to make it hard for hackers who break into my system to figure out what they have to crack to get my important business data. The fact that the net result is that it has the potential to make discovery harder is only a side-effect for which I cannot be sanctioned.
Second, if someone can establish that you should be able to produce something, this system isn't going to protect you. Crypto is just a high-tech shovel and a hard drive is just a high-tech back yard. Saying that you aren't going to produce an encrypted document is no different than saying that you aren't going to tell someone where in the back yard you buried that document. The court is not without tools to deal with uncooperative parties.
Last, if you get involved with subpoenas or discovery, seek advice from something stronger than this posting.
So the media companies have to hand over the specs and keys to the HD or BlueRay DRM encryption? (Otherwise, they could be hiding secret information on the discs to overthrow the government.)
No need for the sneer quotes, unless you are a nanny-stater who condones this type of governmental intrusiveness.
"This aspect of the law is routinely ignored on Slashdot to try and enhance the "evil" reputation of the law."
I think the law, just on a general level, earns its evil reputation well enough. So they used a condom, but they still buggered you.
damaged by dogma
"I guess when wire-tapping and CCTV just isn't enough"
The issue, of course, is that systems are being put into place that can be used against citizens who protest. By using "terrorism" to create fear, those who want corruption and control are building systems that can be used to give them more control. Laws that required centuries to build are now being thrown away with as little awareness by citizens as can be designed.
The movie Zeitgeist explains it: The movie Zeitgeist (2007) claims to explain it all, from an example of how people are controlled by myths, to how people who control government use fear to get more control, to why the U.S. government is pursuing a policy of hyper-inflation of the dollar now.
The movie is free and can be downloaded using a BitTorrent client, burned to a CD (a DVD is not necessary), and most modern DVD TV players will play it.
The Zeitgeist movie is very poor in some places, such as the opening sequences, and excellent in most places.
Don't expect emerging consciousness of very difficult subjects like those in the movie Zeitgeist to be free of error. The movie correctly says that "resurrection after 3 days" is part of many ancient myths, with an astrological background. However, the movie also speculates that Jesus Christ may never have existed. That is beside the point. In fact, whether Jesus Christ existed or not, many people in the world thought that his ideas and the ideas of his follower Paul of Tarsus were an improvement over what they had before. Even many people who do not claim to be part of a religion think that.
Those who want more information about how corrupters use fear can watch the free 3-Part BBC movie: The Power Of Nightmares: The Rise Of The Politics Of Fear (2004).
For those who don't know, and want to know what is happening and why, those movies are an excellent and entertaining way to start.
For people and their friends who invest in weapons and the manipulatable parts of the oil business, such as Cheney and the Bush family, controlling the government is how they make money and get more power. People from rich families often grow up believing that it is acceptable for them to kill people to get what they want. It is difficult, however, for the average person to believe that someone who already has a lot of money would kill others simply because he wants more money.
I am surprised at how much conflict of interest is allowed in the U.S. and U.K. governments. Why are weapons and oil investors like Cheney and Bush allowed to decide about starting wars in countries that have oil? (Afghanistan may not have oil, but oil investors want to build a pipeline through Afghanistan.)
Now the U.S. and U.K. governments are planning to start a war with Iran, another oil-rich country.
TrueCrypt has "plausible deniability. I wondered why TrueCrypt encryption software has "plausible deniability". I guess that is why. We will soon all be needing it.
I use the followinf procedure to securely erase HDDs:
1. Setup fil disk encryption with a random password (Linux dm-crypt)
2. Overwrite mounted encrypted volume with random data (not cryptogtaphically strong)
The result cannot be distinguished from an ordinary encrypted disk, and that can be mathematically demonstrated. Also there is no way I can prove there is really no data there. Again mathematically proovable that I cannot demonstrate this.
May other secure deletion utilities produce results much like this, i.e. not distinguishable from encrypted files or whole disks.
So, everybody that does secure deletion of this type now goes to prison? I don't think so. What I think is that it requires a conclusive explanation of this impossibility to get this law restricted to cases were the authorities first can proove the presence of encrypted data. This will be the cases where the users do not understand crypto. All eth others will szucessfully evade this exceedingly incompetent law.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Truecrypt's plausible deniability is worthless or even dangerous.
;) ).
If you have Truecrypt installed it just means you're going to rot in jail till you can either:
1) Convince the police that some random file you have that they are interested in is not encrypted.
2) Decrypt the file somehow (even if it wasn't encrypted in the first place
You'd be better off downloading some legal porn (or something similarly frowned on but legal) and encrypt sets of them (without truecrypt) and write down the keys somewhere so you never forget or lose it. Then if the Gov says "hand over the keys" you hand over the keys, rather than say "I have no keys".
A Gov like that is going to presume you're guilty of something.
TrueCrypt's plausible deniability is more than that. With it you can have two encrypted volumes within the same volume only with different keys. If you are asked for a key, you give them one. They unencrypt the volume you gave them a key for and they find nothing. More information (and probably a much better description) here.
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
It seems to me that anyone banged up for 'forgetting' their pass phrase would have excellent grounds for appeal, and overturning the law. And let's face it, this morally corrupt, authoritarian Labour government has had it's nefarious laws overturned before.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
No, it is when search — the practice long accepted as a legitimate law-enforcement tool — is not enough.
If we allow police to search houses (including safes — demanding keys, when needed), it is only logical to allow them to also decrypt data (demanding keys, when needed).
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You miss my point totally.
The gov thug comes and says "Ah you're using Truecrypt, we know about that cool feature they mention in their website, so hand us all keys".
And if you're stupid you go "Uh I only have one key".
Then:
a) If you're not telling the truth, you're in deep shit.
b) If you're telling the truth, you're in deeper shit, since there's no key #2 to give them.
Think Truecrypt is so great now? Truecrypt's "plausible deniability" feature is crap.
What I call plausible deniability would be if a very popular linux distro ALWAYS generated a 100MB (or 2% of diskspace, whichever is larger up, to a max of say 1GB) file full of random stuff and plonked it on the filesytem, and it always included encryption tools by default.
Would normal users be willing to pay the price of the "wasted" space and time?
Come on, this is rediculous. First off, if they wanted to, data recovery services would be able to get the key back from the disk.
Secondly, by doing this you are moving from unable to comply to actively impeding the police in their duties. Your punishment just got upgraded.
Just say you can't recall/find the key.