Slashdot Mirror
UK Police Want Plug-In Computer Crime Detectors
An anonymous reader writes "UK police are talking to private companies about using plug-in USB devices that can scour the hard drive of any device they are attached to, searching for evidence of illegal activity. The UK's Association of Chief Police Officers is considering using commercial devices that can perform targeted searches of text, pictures and computer code on hard drives, allowing untrained cops to detect anything from correspondence on stolen goods to child pornography. Police in the UK are desperate for a way of slashing the backlog of machines seized by the police in raids, with many forces having a backlog that will take a year to process." Maybe they shouldn't seize so many computers.
So, are they saying that they want existing forensics software, with a drool-proof wizard attached, bootable from a flash drive(because hell, who needs forensic hardware write blocking when you can totally trust software to do the job under any circumstance?) or are they actually proposing that the program be able to detect evil?
Anybody want to sponsor a contest to see who can write a USB driver that defeats this within the fewest lines of code?
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
that'll probably work fine for the lay-man, but will having an encrypted hard drive count as evidence of illegal activity
While this move is legitimate in a structural sense(i.e. if the search would otherwise be legitimate, doing it with this would be ok, and if it is otherwise illegitimate, doing it with this wouldn't become ok); but there are practical considerations that make me nervous.
One is write blocking. To prevent corruption, tampering, and similar issues, it is good practice to use a hardware write blocker and, where possible, work from a disk image made from the original disk through a write blocker. A USB bootable system is not going to have that level of assurance. In a lot of cases, cops will have to monkey with the BIOS to get it to boot the USB drive and, with the vast number of BIOSes, chipsets, hardware RAID boards, softRAID crap, etc, etc. out there, trusting software to prevent tampering or corruption seems potentially troublesome.
More generally, the demand for a "PC breathalyzer" is a demand that a difficult problem be made trivial so it can be done by unskilled or ignorant people. That sort of demand is rarely a harbinger of future quality, which is disquieting when people's freedoms are potentially at stake.
Any citizen who believes in human rights & the sovereignty of the individual should be willing to spend a little time in jail, rather than give the encryption key. A few days in jail is a small inconvenience compared to the return of tyranny that existed in the UK prior to 1800. You have the right to not be tortured into giving false confessions - this isn't the Medieval Ages or the Catholic Inquisition.
Remain strong; remain silent.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
One principle of computer forensics is that if a computer is manipulated in any way, the evidence may be corrupted by such operation, and this could be used by defence attornies. Real computer forensics involves getting the computer powered down, removing the disk, setting it up in a test jig with write protect enabled, and reading the complete image from the disk onto a sterile environment for analysis. I don't think Mr. Plod will meet the test of admissibility into evidence! How is he going to prove to the court that the suspected data were not on the USB key to start with? If he has interfered with the computer in any way by plugging in a USB key, then the evidence is contaminated.
How much time have you spent in jail?