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."
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]
any forensic team with an ounce of competence will copy the original HDD and work off the copy, so that just won't work.
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. --Denis Diderot
that is, of course, assuming that the police forensics team has an ounce of competence.
Having a known self destruct switch may cause a person to end up even worse trouble. This is a discussion that occurs periodically on a number of cryptography forums.
Almost all police departments will image the drive, then present the person with the image to decrypt. If the image gets stung by a self destruct Trojan, then the police will know that its not a forgotten password, and then proceed to use rubber hose decryption to obtain the contents of the drive.
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
Just blind them with goatse as the first file, they won't go near the rest.
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.
Because private companies are the pinnacle of competence and government is the pit of deepest stupidity.
Let me guess: you're either American, Israeli or Australian.
Because the rest of the world is smarter and more competent than people from those three countries...
No, but apparently parent's reading comprehension is superior to your own.
Or, to put it a way you might understand: "Whoooosh!"
Several animal rights groups in the UK are officially designated terrorist organisations, because frankly they engage in acts of terror.
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.
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.