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In UK, Two Convicted of Refusing To Decrypt Data
ACKyushu clues us to recent news out of the UK, where two people have been successfully prosecuted for refusing to provide authorities with their encryption keys, resulting in landmark convictions that may have carried jail sentences of up to five years. There is uncertainty in that the names of the people convicted were not released; and without those names, the Crown Prosecution Service said it was unable to track down details of the cases. "Failure to comply with a section 49 notice carries a sentence of up to two years jail plus fines. Failure to comply during a national security investigation carries up to five years jail. ... Of the 15 individuals served, 11 did not comply with the notices. Of the 11, seven were charged and two convicted. Sir Christopher [Rose, the government's Chief Surveillance Commissioner] did not report whether prosecutions failed or are pending against the five charged but not convicted in the period covered by his report."
Look into the Phonebook filesystem. Not quite what you mentioned, but almost as good.
If you want to be seen, stand up. If you want to be heard, speak up. If you want to be respected, sit down and shut up.
I think you're approaching this from the wrong angle.
The issue is no longer whether you can prove their is nothing incriminating in the "ecrypted file" but whether the old memory you've had for 7 months is an encrypted file or not.
Further, TrueCrypt is well known. "Hey, do you have a second 'hidden' partition on this slightly incriminating but pretty inoccuous drive?" "No." "I don't believe you. Do not collect £200."
This is a very, very bad day for the British public.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
This means, you can be forced to do self-incrimination. What's next? Do we remove the right to remain silent? In dubio contra reo?
This is the UK. They already have removed the right to remain silent in the Justice and Public Order Act 1994.
Where the definition of 'terrorist cell' is up to the authorities, and in this case means 'animal rights activist'. It could mean anything according to this corrupt, overbearing government.
Some animal rights activists do use terror tactics, including bombing campaigns, so in this case it might not just mean 'animal rights activist', it could mean everything you normally mean by 'terrorist'. Yes, there are huge problems with the law, but its being used against animal rights campaigners is not de facto one of them.
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I'm stunned, I don't know why, to see people debating this as if this is the first time the issue has crossed their consciousness. News flash: this has been in the public water supply for at least two decades now. It's important, and if you haven't given it some thought long ago, you're not taking life seriously, you're just a woodpusher in the game theory of human realpolitik.
It boils down to a very simple premise: that entropy is a munition.
If you have some large chunk (say 100MB) of random bits in a file on your computer, there is no way to prove that there isn't some password that will decrypt this block of bits into meaningful information. Any chunk of information content which looks like pure entropy can be accused of harboring munitions, if you're trying to hit the preservation of society nerve, or child pornography, if you're trying to hit the righteousness of the flesh nerve (we all care about flesh). Steganography is the art of boiling a thin soup: very small amount of pure entropy hidden in a huge amount of tedious backdrop (say 200GB of licit pink matter).
If you have a large quantity of real physical entropy, there is of course no way to produce a password, and neither is there any way to prove that the entropy is real.
The authorities find this unbearable, so we are now deep into guilt by association. Caught hanging out with random bits, go directly to jail.
Any public discussion of the matter would conclude that our social concept of judicial fairness is incompatible with this new guilt by association model. What kind of society would declare entropy a munition? How would we all go about scrubbing anything that looks like entropy from our electronic records? It's not clear it is possible to comply with the implications of this, even if greater society drank the Orwellian Spook-Aid.
Hence the secrecy. If the spooks destroy 1000 innocent lives in the course of protecting society as we know it, it appears to be a cost we're going to have to bear.
The easy way to cease to think seriously about this is to invoke Stalinist escalation: that 1000 lives is soon 30 million lives.
Don't be so hasty. Sun Tsu beheaded one giggling princess to make every other princess march with the discipline of soldiers. For his needs, one was enough.
The credit industry doesn't work on principles much better than our agents of darkness. The suits have succeeded in labeling credential fraud as identity theft. Note the slight shift in blame here: it's not the design of VISA at fault (which could hardly be worse), it's your fault for offering up your digits in the first place (well, you can't use your VISA card without doing so, but why niggle?)
I hand pieces of information about myself to thousands of institutions. If the information is gathered and used against me, somehow I'm to blame, not the thousands of institutions who regard protecting the sensitive information they demanded from me as a cost center to be outsourced to India.
The great line in Brazil is "Confess quickly, or you'll jeopardize your credit rating."
Our credit system is nearly as arbitrary and secretive as this business of guilt by entropy. Innocent before proven guilty. The credit system is exempt from our normal social protections against slander. Any merchant can file a damaging untruth about me with little basis in fact, few avenues of complaint, and no ultimate liability whatsoever. The rating agencies will then spread this slander around and I can't prosecute them for spreading damaging falsehoods about me, even if I finally prove that the original merchant lied, and no sensible agency would persist in believing the original claim.
If we're not up in arms about the violation of our social norms concerning slander implicit to the credit industry, I don't harbour much hope that cottage outrage in this forum over incrimination by entropy is going to make any dent in the real world.
Stay tuned for the next exciting chapter, where encryption keys are extracte
Indeed. Here's two different videos to drive the point home, one from an attorney and the other from a police officer himself.
Never ever EVER talk to the police. Nothing you can say to them is going to help you. Shut your damn mouth and ask for an attorney.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
"Seven animal rights activists who tried to close down Huntingdon Life Sciences by blackmailing companies linked to the animal testing laboratory were jailed today for between four and 11 years. ... a six-year campaign involving hoax bombs and falsified allegations of child abuse"
"The activists plotted their campaign from their headquarters, a country cottage near Hook, in Hampshire. From the building -- which police had bugged -- they used encrypted emails, spreadsheets and coded messages to organise the blackmail of the companies and individuals."
"While rarely causing physical harm, these offenders thrived on the fear they created through threats and intimidation."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jan/21/huntingdon-animal-rights