Slashdot Mirror
British Teen Jailed Over Encryption Password
An anonymous reader writes "Oliver Drage, 19, of Liverpool has been convicted of 'failing to disclose an encryption key,' which is an offense under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 and as a result has been jailed for 16 weeks. Police seized his computer but could not get past the 50-character encrypted password that he refused to give up. And just to get it out of the way, obligatory XKCD."
Don't you have the right to remain silent, so as to not incriminate yourself? We have it here in the US.
No. That right was removed about 10 years ago.
Now, if you refuse to answer questions during your arrest and questioning, the prosecution are allowed to use that silence as circumstantial evidence against you.
Never start with the head. It just makes the persons memory all fuzzy.
No sig for you!!
Short answer: No. Through some creative legal thinking producing your encryption password is now considered equal to handing over the key to your safe, not to compel information from your mind. It's bullshit but Britain takes 1984 as a role model, not a warning.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Or more recently, Alberto "I do not recall" Gonzales.
I am officially gone from
The fifth amendment doesn't seem to apply in the courts; to quote his honor, William K. Sessions, Chief District Court Judge in Vermont in United States vs. Boucher:
"Holding that the 5th Amendment privilege against self-incrimination does not require the conclusion that a criminal defendant may elect not to divulge a password for an encrypted hard drive."
It also hasn't stopped judges from using the presence of encryption and unwillingness to give up the keys as evidence of misconduct.
If anything, Britain has stronger protection of individual rights than we have here in the US -- the defendant in this case doesn't risk a dozen years in jail, disenfranchisement and being barred from many occupations for life, like he would over here. I'd take good old Ius Commune over our system.
No this law was written as an ego trip by Jack Straw to prove his power. Among other things it reverses the onus of proof thus taking it outside fundamental principles of British (and US) law. It also goes further an limits the means by which you can prove your innocence, prescribing a few (probably impossible) ways. It also deprives the defendant of the right to a jury trial and gags the defendant from talking about the charge with anyone but his lawyer (and gags the lawyer).
In effect a corrupt government official can send you an encrypted email then demand that you provide the key... As you never had it you can never prove your innocence, so they can lock you up for years after a secret trial.
Add to this another set of laws formed by a radical feminist basically assuming any image of a female that you can't prove is of someone over the age of consent (16) is an image of a child (this includes cached images that may be advertisments that you never intended to view).
So the cops can trawl your computer until they find something you can't prove is legal and lock you up. If you take the precaution of encrypting your PC they can lock you up for that too.
We have now removed these politicians from power however the damage has been done. There are murmurs from some of the politicians about repealing some of the very dangerous laws that were brought in, however they are unlikely to repeal any of the technology based ones. There will be no pressure, the journalists over here consider it a point of pride to not understand technology.
In britain there is no presumption of innocence.
Of course there is. The presumption of innocence in English and Scots law comes from common law. The concept itself has been part of British society for thousands of years - Alexander Volokh says that it has been present since Greece and Sparta and Rome, all the way back to the first (Judaic?) legal systems.
Common law is the basis of the British legal system. Your logic is like claiming that "there is no law against murder in Britain" and then going on to claim that this means murder is legal. English Law - "there is no statute making murder illegal. It is a common law crime - so although there is no written Act of Parliament making murder illegal, it is illegal by virtue of the constitutional authority of the courts and their previous decisions."
It after that went on and voted into the statute book several hundred criminal offences which explicitly postulate that you are guilty until proven innocent. The RIPA act, The H&S act, you name them. Half of Blair's legislation (Blair and Co raised the number of criminal offences on the statutes by more than 100% in 10 years) is based around "guilty until proven innocent".
[citationneeded]. Please name these "hundreds of acts that explicitly say British people are guilty until proven innocent.". And are you seriously blaming the Blair government (which came to power in 1997) for the 1974 Health and Safety Act?!? What?!
So the new government has actually promissed to fix this by accepting _ALL_ rights in the convention and repealing most of Blair's handywork as a big block vote including most of the RIPA act.
Right, that would be the same Conservative party that fully supported the RIP Act then? ('Only a pitiful handful of MPs (pictured below) were present to debate the bill, which was fully supported by the "opposition" Conservative party, and passed by 189 votes to 47 keeping the majority of its original clauses intact.')