Slashdot Mirror
First Use of RIPA to Demand Encryption Keys
kylehase writes "The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) is being used for the first time to force an animal activist to reveal encryption keys for encrypted files she claims to have no knowledge of. According to the article, she could face up to two years if she doesn't comply."
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) is being used for the first time to force an animal activist to reveal encryption keys for encrypted files she claims to have no knowledge of.
That's why you use an encrypted file system with a duress key. In the event of coercion, you give them a key that *oops* results in the destruction of the data.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Acquire virus.
Virus encrypts hard drive with unknown key.
Virus forwards CP to authorities.
Authorities bust you for having CP, for not revealing those encrypted files, AND for probably having more CP. Most likely will be averaged..say..15k is a picture..you have 200GB. The media will say that you were arrested with 100k+ pieces of child pornography.
Five years later, turns out that it really was a virus. Sorry about that..here's your freedom again.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
The biggest problem I see with these kinds of "give it up or else" laws is how do you account for the situations when someone genuinely doesn't know the information you are seeking? Should someones ignorance be a jailable offense?
Are you telling me, that I could output /dev/random to a file, place it on my friends hard drive, say it contains valuable information pertaining to a case and he could go to jail or be fined for not revealing the password/key?
This gives me an idea!
Either way, if you need to you can get around this with TrueCrypt by taking some precautions such as:
1) Not naming it with the default extension (.tc)
2) Put it somewhere inconspicuous and name it appropriately
3) Making sure that it's a hidden encrypted volume
4) Open it through TrueCrypt and don't save the history, or passwords, or as automount, or similar
Shit, that was a typo, I meant to type FIRST POST!!!
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
how can you be put in jail for not knowing something?
Put her in a lead vest and throw her into the sea. If she drowns, it means she didn't have the keys, but if she swims, she's a wicked witch and deserves to be punished.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. --Denis Diderot
1) Generate a file with whatever you like in it (anything believable and non-incriminating). Make sure the file's lenght matches the encrypted file.
2) Reverse-engineer a one-time pad using this file and the encrypted file.
3) Supply the one-time pad to authorities with instructions on how to use it.
Ta dah!
1) IANAL.
2) I am not familiar with the details of this case.
That said, I believe that there *is* a time and place where this sort of activity counts as reasonable search & seizure. Say the cops get a warrant to search your house, and you have a safe, and you say, "gee, officer, I have *no* idea how that safe got mounted behind that picture," nobody will believe you and you'll get subpoena'd for the combo. Encryption keys shouldn't be treated any differently from a combination to a safe. If there's a reasonable suspicion for evidence to be hidden somewhere, the cops have a duty to search it.
Can't a court order someone to provide a physical key as part of a subpoena or a warrant? Why does law treat encryption keys differently?
A Better solution is plausible deniability.
One password gives your uber-secret-plans-for-world-conquest, the other password gives a few hundred meg of soft porn (or whatever).
That way, you appear to not be resisting their demands.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Why don't they just sign the "We'll Do Whatever The Fuck We Want Anytime We Want Act" and just get it over with already?
~S
If such a law were enacted in the US, we would be protected, ostensibly, by the 5th amendment to the Constitution. I say ostensibly because apparently the Constitution is "just a piece of paper" now, and we (some of us) have forgotten about the rule of law.
So, this could happen here. Easily. We need to find some way to restore the rule of law here lest we become like that other large country just across the Bering Strait from us.
Hmmm...
In the United States, you could never be compelled to turn over an encryption key as that is a violation of the 5th amendment
I wouldn't be so sure. The 5th amendment only protects against self-incrimination, but the search may be for evidence against a third party, in which case you may be compelled to comply.
It's also not clear that giving up your encryption keys would be considered "testimonial", so it might not be protected under the 5th amendment according to US courts. See here (somewhat outdated in other aspects, but an accurate reflection of US policy on the legal hair splitting):
http://www.cybercrime.gov/cryptfaq.htm
TrueCrypt allows hidden volumes, indistinguishable from one volume. The file size is constant.
TrueCrypt works very, very well. I use it with just one volume to protect passwords and other files.
When you don't want to encrypt a volume, but just a file, Gnu Privacy Guard is best.
This is an outrage. Here, we have a case where a person claims she does not know something, but the government is demanding of her to comply. But let's suppose, for a moment, that she is telling the truth and she has no knowledge of these encryption keys. How could she prove it? There is no way to prove a negative. It is impossible to prove that you DON'T have something; you can prove that you DO have it by producing it. There, you see, I have it. But if you don't have it, there's no way to prove it. They should let her go.
I forgot to say that TrueCrypt is open source and free, and, in my experience, perfectly reliable. There are Windows and Linux versions, and a Mac OS X version is planned.
Don't forget to donate if you use TrueCrypt extensively.
The present government corruption in both the U.S. and U.K. started when secret violence was authorized as a way of protecting oil investments of British and U.S. investors. Tending toward outlawing privacy is a way of continuing that corruption. Any government that can act in secret cannot be a democracy, because citizens cannot participate in things that are unknown to them.
This is a good site to read about the corruption, and to contribute links: U.S. Government corruption TimeLines. Example: Complete 911 Timeline, 3895 events.
Encrypting your data and not hiding it is the same as getting a $100k super secure safe, locking your stuff in it, but leaving it in the middle of the living room. Any { law enforcement agency / criminal gang / anyone with more resources and more muscles that you } will just force you to give them the key. In other words, they see the super secure safe and automatically assume there must be at least $1M in there and then they force you to give them the key. The govt will cite all kinds of stupid idiotic laws, the criminals will start cutting of the fingers (yours or your loved ones').
The solution is to use something like steganography and hide the data such that nobody even will suspect anything. The best secrets are the ones that are not even known to exist.
If the adversary is convinced that you do have the data and knows the data type, then create a similar but fake data set to be substituted for the real one.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
It should be noticed that the particular groups of people who campaign against Huntingdon Life Sciences are terrorists:
They use threats of force to induce fear in people at HLS;
They have used actual violent force, at the work and at the homes, of people who work at HLS;
They threaten anyone involved with HLS, their suppliers, etc, with the same degree of violence;
They have placed bombs, which exploded, under the cars of people who work at HLS or are involvd with HLS;
They claim their actions are justifiable, that they are engaged in a violent struggle, that their violence is justified because they must achieve their aims by any means possible.
These are not nice people we are talking about. They are not the innocent defenders of the fluffy bunnies. They are aggressive, violent people and they are familiar with the tools and techniques of covert violence. Curiously they fail to mention their devotion to violence in their own article about this case.
RIPA, like any other "anti-terrorism law", will one day be used against people who have nothing to do with terrorism.
Today is not that day.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
Several animal rights groups in the UK are officially designated terrorist organisations, because frankly they engage in acts of terror.
Linux-based imaging is good only if you are interested in recovery. On the legal side of things, it will not do:
- Please explain to the court how you made a copy of this piece of evidence...
- I connected the drive to our forensic machine and...
- You mean, you connected this hard disk... to your machine?
- Yes of course, then I...
- Did you use a hardware write block?
- Er... I used Linux and mounted the...
- Please, just answer the question. Did you or did you not use a hardware write blocker device to connect the disk to your machine?
- I did not, but...
- Thank you, no further question. I now call for the evidence to be declared tainted and inadmissible in court, since the forensic team failed to use the proper hardware to ensure that no changes would be made to the disk.
There is a whole range of forensic-specific hardware available: write blockers, hardware disk imagers... Use them, or loose your case.
I code, therefore I am.
I have to disagree with one of your points. Some of the most prolific terrorist groups are animal rights activists - they participate in letter bombing campaigns, arson and direct indimitation/attack of life science workers.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
That's actually pretty much a stretch. Your 'decent' lawyer would have to give some sort of proof that there was a second partition there. Something that TrueCrypt is pretty much designed to prevent. You can easily show the existence of the first truecrypt partition - it's there in the open. You can't prove the existence of the second partition.
I'm not sure a judge will buy 'because we didn't find what we were looking for' as a reasonable showing of proof that a second partition exists, and unfortunately, that's all the proof that exists. The formatting method and the processing method result in random data covering the entire partition block, as data is written to both the shown & hidden partitions, that data changes from random to encrypted. However the whole goal of the crypto data is to make it look random.
So you have potentially 3 blocks of random data each constructed with the same randomizing algorythm. How exactly do you show where one begins & one ends? How do you even show that the 3rd block exists? The whole purpose of the hidden block is to make it almost impossible to prove the existence of that third block. You literally are more likely to brute force the key than you are to prove the existence of the hidden partition.
Use them, or loose your case.
And it runs around free! Wreaking havoc! Smashing in windows and stealing car stereos! Eating whole bags of Cheetos and vomiting them up into your dress shoes! I'll tell you -- there's nothing worse than a case that has been loosed upon the world. Those things are wild.
Teacher hating very often fits into that same way of thinking.
Business and government are similar in that they are all staffed and run by people (that is, greedy grafty nasty people). They are different in that we elect our government people and there is some oversight of the work and the results - sometimes late, and sometimes shoddy, but the oversight is there.. A business on the other hand, involves no community decision, is run as a dictatorship and there is minimal oversight (less and less every day since the 80's).
I'm not anti-business, just honest. The problems come from the people, not the organizational method. The organizational method is supposed to be a way of compensating for the problems while minimizing the bad side-effects.
Being anti-gov't or anti-teacher is just a way of parroting something you heard from someone else -- it's not a legitimate position to argue from.
When you initialize your encrypted disk space, you tell Truecrypt how many containers you want. Say that you choose 2. When you mount your Truecrypt drive, you must always mount both containers. In this way, Truecrypt knows and can maintain integrity between the two--they won't start to overwrite or corrupt each other, because they are both known about and available. If you ever only give the first key (you can't just give the second key, as the second container is entirely within the first) then you run the risk of corrupting the second container--in fact, any write operation will probably do it.
Now you can choose more than just two containers, and the same applies. One thing I'm not sure of is whether the third container is fully within the second. None of this, however, helps in hiding the existence of a PGP key. If your opponent has access to your email servers and can see you sending messages encrypted by PGP you're gonna have some explaining to do when it comes to investigation time. I don't know of any steganographic programs with plausible deniability that are out at this time. If anyone's heard of any please let us know. Even this has some subtle nuances.
If I am sending encrypted mail using PGP, I'm using someone else's PGP key. I don't have to have a PGP key myself in order to do this. If someone else is sending me encrypted messages, they could be sending it using anyone's PGP key--it's only obviously my key if it's provable that I've read the messages. For example, Alice could encrypt a message using Bob's public key, and then send that message to Charlie in an effort to frame him. Charlie gets the junk message and deletes it, but the feds who were wiretapping Charlie come in and demand to know what was in the message. Charlie can't answer--he has no idea. So he gets 2 years in prison from the RIPA act.