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UK Court Rejects Encryption Key Disclosure Defense
truthsearch writes "Defendants can't deny police an encryption key because of fears the data it unlocks will incriminate them, a British appeals court has ruled. The case marked an interesting challenge to the UK's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), which in part compels someone served under the act to divulge an encryption key used to scramble data on a PC's hard drive. The appeals court heard a case in which two suspects refused to give up encryption keys, arguing that disclosure was incompatible with the privilege against self incrimination. In its ruling, the appeals court said an encryption key is no different than a physical key and exists separately from a person's will."
Suppose some incriminating evidence exists but it is hidden in a secret location. Can you be forced to disclose that location?
If not, then why not store your encrypted data on a huge partition of random data. To get it you need both the key and the location of the data. The latter you can simply refuse to disclose.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Is there a system which will allow the use of a 'duress' key? If the duress key is given instead of the real key the encrypted data is erased. This would be easy enough to defeat by a suitably motivated investigator, but they'd have to have figured out what was going to happen first...
What about when there's no key to hand over?
For context, click Parent.
This is the precise argument that They will be using for lenghtening the prison terms for NOT divulging the key once we've swallowed the fact that not-remembering something can get you in prison.
And then They just need to send a collection of /dev/random with a filename suggesting underage pornography to your email address and keep you imprisoned for decades. Your ex-girlfriend could do and call the police. Your enemies from the cubicle farm could do, too. Your competing business and even blackmailing spammers could.
I smell serious blackmailing business: pay up and we'll send you the key you need to prove yourself innocent.
It is interesting to note than while section 53 states criminal penalties for non-disclosure on part of defendant, section 55 does NOT state any criminal penalties against misuse/abuse of such information.
The Government has covered its shiny metal a$$ well with this section.
So the courts can sentence you to 6 months imprisonment for NOT revealing the key, but if you reveal the key and some government official loses it in the next train (which happens monthly), the CP or the government official cannot be imprisoned for the loss or any such loss caused to you by that loss.
Brilliant!
All the more reason for me to NOT give out my key.
Until such time i see a CP or a minister sentenced to jail for loss of residents' confidential information, am not comfortable with providing ANY information to this orwellian government.
I WILL claim memory loss for this. let them prove am lying
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
It gets worse. /dev/urandom > file
Theory: with a good encryption program any encrypted data should look random.
That truecrypt volume should be impossible to tell from a file I've created with
cat
So you could type that very command and 5 years later they ask for your encryption key...
Key?
To jail with you!
same goes for any random/semirandom data you have which has so mime type.
Now I'm willing to bet there are programs which can take a photo album and hide an encrypted volume in the least significant bit of the pixels, how would law enforcement deal with that?
"GIVE US THE KEY!"
"but but but... what do you want the key to..."
Long story short, if you live in the UK and own an electronic data storage device you can now be thrown in jail for no reason at all.
My thoughts exactly. People seem to get all pissy when I say something like "if you don't have the balls to protect your freedoms, you don't deserve them". I'm not a regular protester at any events or anything like that, but I'd rather be shot for defending my freedom than live to see it gone. Not that I believe privacy exists anymore. The whole world was too slow to act in learning about and defending their privacy in a new technological age. Sure, there were a few technologically aware people with a small voice that was easy to push aside. Too late, privacy's gone. Only way to get it back is to lay your own global network in secret and hope the governments of the world never hear about it.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
A duress-key that wipes data is no good. Any serious investigation will take a complete copy of the data as the first step, so wiping does you no good at all.
What you can do, and which is done, is to have "plausible deniability". Truecrypt does it like this:
You have a 1GB (for example) file that contains an encrypted filesystem that contains 500MB of files.
The free space (500MB) *may*, or may not, contain a second encrypted filesystem. There is no way to tell without knowing the second "inner"-key.
So, if pressed to give up the key, you give up the outer key, giving access to 500MB of perhaps mildly embarassing, but ultimately harmless stuff. If asked about the "inner"-key you say there isn't one. The default operation of Truecrypt is for there NOT to be one.
So, it's plausible you're telling the truth; could be the volume is larger than the filesystem simply because you wanted space for more files. It's not as if a half-full filesystem as such is suspicious.
It's unlikely they could force you to give up certain information without even showing a likeliness that the information EXISTS.
That's "plausible deniability".
You can say: "There is no second key", and there is no way of figuring out if that answer is truthful or not.
AFAICT, President Bush had 4 options with Afghanistan after 9/11.
(1) Ignore it. This was the Clinton strategy, and had resulted in slowly escalating attacks on American and European soil over the previous decade or so. Whether it ultimately succeeded would have depended on whether momentum could be regained on a host of other fronts to make radical Islam irrelevant in the Muslim world - a questionable assumption. Nevertheless, it may have been the second most effective option available IMHO.
(2) Take out the Taliban, disrupt Al Queda, then leave. Depending on your perspective, this would have stirred up the ant's nest (causing a rash of new attacks) or reset the clock by ten years (a cold war-like strategy that worked pretty well against an aggressive Soviet Union). This may have been the best option for the US in retrospect, although it would do nothing to help the Afghan's who were brutally oppressed by the Taliban (and most previous regimes :-/ ).
(3) Take out the Taliban, evict Al Queda, and stick around for nation-building. As you mention, this would almost certainly be disastrous. If you're planning to fight radical Islam, this is the least favorable ground on the planet.
(4) Take out the Taliban, evict Al Queda, then move the field of battle somewhere else. This was the Bush option, with "somewhere else" set to Iraq. This approach successfully set back Al Queda by 10 years (and counting), but cost the US and Britain the good will of most of its allies in the world. I suspect the president was counting on the Iraqi people embracing freedom and democracy, rapidly establishing a stable government, and joining the fight, which would have made this the winning option. If so, he miscalculated.
You advocate waiting them out, and that has worked thus far with a pretty darned significant list of anti-democracy types. Not with Libya, though - they settled down only after a bombing run that killed Khadafi's daughter (among 45 military and 15 civilian casualties) - similar to option 2 above. It also failed most notably in the prelude to WWII, as has been endlessly rehashed over the past 7 years, so there are no guarantees.
In retrospect, though, and with full 20/20 hindsight, and recognizing the high cost to the long-suffering Afghan people, overthrowing the Taliban and scattering the ants before a token nation-building exercise with the Northern Alliance amid steady get-the-heck-out-of-Dodge withdrawal was probably our best option - and a lesson to be learned for the future, if we're smart.
Over here in Sweden TV8 showed "The Anti-American" talking about how various european saw at USA. They talked with people in Poland, France and the UK. Maybe there was some italians or something to.
Very interesting and it somewhat made me feel bad for saying stupid things about USA sometimes. Then french people was the most funny one talking about how everyone in USA except in NY was rasists and also how to keep the american culture and english words and influences out of their country.
Yeah right, because french people are so open minded when it comes to influences themself? And they don't think everyone should learn french? Hillarous.
The polish people really liked you and looked up against you, seeing america as the saviour against everyone invading poland. And the UK as your strongest ally obviously like you to except they want to be the imperial worlds #1 force and not just follow lead as it is now :)
Sure we complain about your wars and playing world police, but in the end us europeans and everyone else always wait to long and do to little so I guess it's good that USA step in and fix up the crap, even if it's not a really democratic decision.
The sad part is that you just step in where you have something to gain from stepping in, so problems in countries where you don't gain anything from interfering nothing will happen. But that's fairly understandable in general to.
Oh, and they talked about how Europe, china (?) and especially japan needed the oil from the middle east region much more than USA but didn't helped to keep it political stable and keep the oil flowing. We just took the benefit without helping. Japan can always blame it on how they are pacifists. And also how you could have got the oil real cheap anyway so they argued that wasn't the factor, at least not egoistic and just for your own sake.
Anyway, interesting program.
only if you care about civilian casualties.
as for finding terrorists, they're too useful. I don't mean in a conspiracy theory doing the governments bidding way. I mean they can be used to raise political capital.
Lets take a the example of ETA in the basque country of Spain. Every time there's a scandal or some big fuckup by senior government officials there just happens to be a crackdown on ETA members shortly after. Oil tanker disaster = crackdown. Senior official sex scandal = smaller crackdown. with lots of headlines about all the ETA members arrested pushing the sandals off the front page.
It's well known that the authorities in Spain keep tabs on most of the organisation and could probably round up most of them overnight if they really wanted.
The heavy handed way they treat it only serves to increase the number of recruits, the organisation would have faded away to almost nothing if the Spanish government didn't intern people and fuck up their lives as part of this.
Now I wonder if there are any parallels with how the US runs it's own war on terror...
Want to hold on to political power? don't even dream of getting rid of the terrorists, they're a minor threat but you can use them to demand a great deal of power.