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US Judge Rules Defendant Can Be Forced To Decrypt Hard Drive
A Commentor writes "Perhaps to balance the good news with the Supreme Court ruling on GPS, a judge in Colorado has ordered a defendant to decrypt her hard drive. The government doesn't have the capability to break the PGP encryption, and 'the Fifth Amendment is not implicated by requiring production of the unencrypted contents' of the defendant's computer."
If you don't, you'll have to see a man with a $5 wrench...
If there's incriminating evidence, surely this is a perfect example on why the person can't decrypt as it WOULD self incriminate them!
Waiting for an amusing sig.
"I forgot."
I find it funny that a quick search on the subject yielded an article from the same site, with the opposite finding.
Article in 2007: Judge: Man can't be forced to divulge encryption passphrase
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9834495-38.html
Article in 2012: Judge: Americans can be forced to decrypt their laptops
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57364330-281/judge-americans-can-be-forced-to-decrypt-their-laptops/
I'm fine with them breaking your encryption if they have probable cause; however, forcing you to give the password does seem to have a pretty straight-forward logical path to incriminating yourself (Especially if you are guilty and a subsequent search will yield something on the device).
Now there's a solid reason to start using Truecrypt's hidden volumes. Like hell I'm going to risk having all my private data added to some poorly-secured government database, let alone have every finance-related username and password placed in the hands of some unaccountable underpaid government goon.
This kills the fifth amendment, and the NDAA killed the first, fourth, and sixth amendments. The second amendment has been dead for decades. I think only the 21st amendment is safe in the entire constitution.
Depends on what is stored on that drive i would say No, and take the contempt of court charges.
It's been fairly clearly defined in the past that you are not in any way expected to aid the police during the execution of a warrant, providing keys, passwords, etc is not required be it for the front door, a safe, a computer, etc. You may OFFER to provide them (so they don't need to damage your front door), but you are undre NO obligation to do so.
If the cipher doesn't require the ciphertext to give you a test for determining whether a given key is the right one, then you can claim that any key (including one you just made up from a thermal noise source) is the "real" key, and the fact that it decrypts to gibberish just means you were storing gibberish on the computer.
You won't be believed, but then at that point -- where the government gets to cross-examine and challenge your purported key -- you're pretty clearly coercing testimony, and much more obviously violating the fifth.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Since the laws mean nothing in the US anymore. TrueCrypt goes into great detail about making a decoy OS: http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=hidden-operating-system
"You will obey or molten silver will be poured into your ears."
That's a fitting random quote from Slashdot if I ever saw one. Perhaps that's an implied part of "facing the consequences including contempt of court".
Where did you hide the gun?
That is really the same question. Give us information so we can do you over.
Where is the right to remain silent?
What if you type in 1234 and then say "hmmm. It did not work! It did before!" They can't put you under oath if you do not wish. You must avoid swearing a oath for the rest of you life but hey the are so screwed except for the current supreme court not really doing the job.
"Sorry your honor, I used a very long password made up of computer-generated, random characters: one that I could not possibly remember. I had it written on a scrap of paper on my desk and would only need to type it in on the infrequent chance that I had to reboot my computer. .... You should ask the detectives to re-search through the evidence they collected as the scrap of paper is likely in what they took."
um, if it has a physical key, like a safe key you have to provide it, the 5th only protects you from doing testimony against yourself in court. Now passkey for a PGP file would be testimony.
The people shall be secure in their... effects ...papers...
As a society that hadn't even conceived of electronics, much less computers, I'm quite certain that they would have considered electronic documents to be equivalent to "papers".
Yet another nail in the heart of the US Constitution, and another denial of fundamental rights.
However, if the court issues a subpoena and/or a warrant for the papers, the court is entitled to access them, even if they're on an encrypted device. I'm not sure a simple judicial order from the bench qualifies, but certainly if the judge SIGNS an order he's in the right.
The protection of the constitution is against unreasonable search and seizure, not against justified and documented court inquiries.
I could see how some might wish to treat this as a Fifth Amendment issue, but the documents presumably exist on the hard drive. There is no additional information being demanded of the individual, only that they turn over EXISTING evidence.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Remember, kids: if you have to do something illegal, do not write it down. Anywhere. Once you do, it's no longer something contained solely in your mind and nowhere else, and it is probably subject to subpoena, which will be deemed eminently legal. Don't put it in your diary. Don't tell anyone (you'll lose your expectation of privacy). If you must break the law, never ever speak about it. Do it and move on.
That's called spoliation and is a crime already. You can't do anything to destroy evidence that a court is likely to be interested in.
I didn't read, I don't know what this person is accused of. In the interest of objectivity, I don't want to know. He/she/it may be deserving of The Chair for all I know, but it's a right which is near and dear to our Previously Glorious Country's very foundation that if you choose to do so, you can refrain from saying or admitting evidence that may OR MAY NOT incriminate you. You are only refusing to give the prosecution potential evidence to incriminate you, and do you think you really understand all of the laws where you live better than your tax-payer funded local prosecutors?? And in Today's America, damn near any admission to police can incriminate you in one way or another. Therefore, pleading the 5th should be the default response to police questioning, it's an exorcise of your rights. It's NOT an admission of guilt, it's an embrace of your Constitutional rights. Police are trained to find a way to get you to say something, anything which is not 100% true, and from there they can tear apart your character in court and win a conviction. I've been there and seen it,as soon as an officer can contradict ANYTHING you say in court, you are finished in the eyes of most judges. The courts do not care, their salary is dependent upon convicting and fining a certain percentage of people. You don't have to be a master criminal, you just have to be a citizen that doesn't understand our modern justice system and it's goals. Not saying anything is not only your right, but it prevents police and prosecutors from turning your words against you. In other words, NEVER talk to police.... be it a statement or password.
No American judge gonna force me to decrypt anything !
I ain't gonna buckle under America's draconian laws
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
You know, I can't find the citation right now... but you're ...sort of right.
If it's a physical key to a safe, and you have it, you must provide it.
If it is a /combination/ to a padlock -- you're not.
Of course, the feds don't give a shit since they're a pair of boltcutters or a drill bit away from the inside.
The real question would be if you had an 'unbreakable diamond safe with a combination' if they could require you to produce the combination.
Frankly, I choose to say no. When you create a class of crime for which there exists an innocent person who could not possibly prove prove innocence, you've created something that should not exist.
Of course, they are supposed to prove guilt in the US -- but the notion of knowing the mind of the criminal... is...fallacious at best.
Requiring a man to provide something from the contents of his mind is the very equivalence of creation of thoughtcrime.
"Prosecutors in this case have stressed that they don't actually require the passphrase itself, and today's order appears to permit Fricosu to type it in and unlock the files without anyone looking over her shoulder. They say they want only the decrypted data and are not demanding "the password to the drive, either orally or in written form."
So this quote makes me wonder, what encryption software is out there that can be configured with a "doomsday" passphrase that will automatically begin some sort of secure delete process when entered? Of course with a fancy "decryption in progress" dialog window or something?
I guess if they figure out what you did, you could be charged with destruction of evidence but if that is a lesser sentence than the wire fraud it wouldn't be a bad move.
I think one of the first things they do is make an image of your hard drive, preserving the data, no matter what you do to it. Much better to keep the key itself on destructible media and destroy it when the cops knock at your door. Or steganographically hide it in plain sight in the digital picture frame with your kid's pictures. Without the passphrase, they can't prove that a suitably random key exists in a JPG.
Has anyone actually read the 5th? If not here is is:
"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation"
The few words that are relevant here are "nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself".
A defendant does not have to answer questions about a case but has to allow lawful searches and provide subpoenaed documents in readable form. If those documents or other evidence is in a safe the defendant is required to open the safe. To me that is the same thing as providing a password.
Another point is that the founding fathers never conceived of a situation where evidence could be hidden in plain sight by using a special word. They never took that into account when they wrote the amendment and interpretation has to change to take that issue into account.
If she claims she cannot provide the password for whatever reason (or simply because she forgot) there is nothing they can do. Read the article, it even states that someone cannot be punished for something they cannot do.
They would need evidence she HAS the password at all.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
destruction of a key is not destruction of evidence. The evidence is still intact - just encrypted.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
All this will do is trip off use of PGP that includes a "duress" password.
Using it will scramble the disk beyond ANY recoverability.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
5th amendment protects one against oral testimony against oneself, not self-incrimination or being forced to provide evidence.
The 5th amendment doesn't specify "oral testimony against oneself"
It says:
No person shall be ...compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.
That is fairly broadly worded such that giving a passphrase can certainly be witnessing against oneself as it means providing information (witnessing) against yourself. Not to mention that the passphrase is in your head, so it isn't a physical thing to hand over either.
Which brings us to the 4th amendent which is supposed to keep the government out of our personal effects.
People seem to forget that the amendments to the Constitution do not give us any rights, but rather they limitthe government and how far they" can infringe on our "natural rights."
Ramona Fricosu indulged in mortgage fraud. Only the banks, the ratings agencies, and Wall Street are allowed to do that.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
You are aware that the first thing they do is to create a copy of the files. Actually, an image of the file system.
The very first thing you do in forensics is to create an image. Standard procedure. A bit for bit identical duplicate. Destroy it all you want, the only thing you accomplish is to piss me off because I have to repeat that procedure.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I will gladly type the password if they provide me with the yellow sticky note that I wrote it down on. I have too many passwords to remember, why should this one be any different. Like anyone can actually remember a password.
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
This has been talked about on the TrueCrypt forums ad nauseum: A suggestion that the utility has a password that would erase volumes.
First, it is part of forensic practice to whip out a hardware write blocker. No hardware write blocker, and the evidence can be thrown out of court.
So, if someone hands a decent forensic analyzer a key, and it zaps the contents of the image, they just roll back the logs, add a destruction of evidence charge.
In the UK, it is illegal to "fail to provide" they key when asked. Therefore, it is, in fact, illegal to forget the password, illegal to lose the password and illegal to have never known the password in the first place, to an encrypted volume in your possession.
Yes, seriously.
Disk encryption software already supports hidden volumes. Even if this kind of decision becomes dominant case law, that won't accomplish anything. People will just start deploying volumes with two passphrases, and when ordered to give up the passphrase, giving up the one that decrypts grandma's recipe collection.
Since there's no way to prove that a second volume exists within the blank space of the first one, encryption will win the day.
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
Only way to know if this bullshit is going to stand is to take it up to the SCOTUS.Divulging a passkey means having to break silence resulting in self incrimination.
The problem is "how do you prove a negative" which at the end of the day is what we end up with. Take myself for example, i'm sure if the cops went through every single backup I have going back a decade i'm sure there are encrypted files that i do NOT have the key for. How could that be? simple I've farted around with tons of different crypto software over the years, everything from WinRAR encryption to PGP to the one that supposedly has the ability to make hidden volumes, can't think of the name right off hand. i'd play with them, try it on some random bullshit, get bored and promptly forget about it. since I back up certain folders in their entirety like my software download folder, my picture folders, etc on a regular basis i'm sure if one were to hunt long and hard enough you could find a couple of those files i simply didn't think to toss, who cares about some 7Mb file nowadays?
so how can I PROVE I don't remember it? can't say that can't happen with a whole drive either because I've had to deal with customers that panicked and forgot their Windows password, sometimes on machines with ALL their financial data and having guns slammed in your face is a traumatic experience. In the end you've got a case where there is no right answer, either she can incriminate herself or if she doesn't remember she can spend the rest of her life in jail and THAT is the problem in a nutshell. With every other example given, such as safes and warrants frankly they can go AROUND you, they can break the safe, the can push you out of the way and execute the warrant, how can they prove what is or isn't in your brain? After all every security program and web page we see says DON'T WRITE DOWN PASSWORDS in 50 foot neon, so how does one prove what is or isn't in their brain?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
First, why not use the obvious countermeasure here. When you create an encrypted volume, you should enter 2 keys, not just one. One will unlock your drive, another will appear to unlock your drive, but in fact deletes the contents of the disk entirely. Essentially it replaces the on-disk encryption keys (which is what your password in reality unlocks) with keys that are only useful for the second partition. The second partition is then enlarged to extend over the original copy. Several programs provide this ability (granted they're for-pay and not cheap, but nevertheless, your privacy is worth something to you isn't it ?). This trick is known to have worked in China (that must have taken some serious amount of balls).
This is how banks do it (one code unlocks the safe, another, seemingly identical sets of an explosive charge destroying the vault's contents).
As for the extradition, let's hope for UK encryption users that they do that. After all, in the US, the above judge will probably get called back, providing such horribly weak justification. Even if this stands, the reality is : in the UK there is zero doubt : authorities can imprison you for not revealing passwords to them, in the US there is doubt (as the supreme court has not yet ruled on a case like this), with predictions that this judge's decision will not stand.
Very subtle, adding the bit about Bush about this judge. As if it's relevant. Nobody ever points out that democrat-appointed judges blocked the repeal of slavery for decades ... And that's equally relevant to today's democrats as this decision reflects on republicans.
In the UK, it is established legal precedent to imprison people for refusing to reveal keys. (in fact this can be applied to foreignors in the UK)
And of course nobody seems to have read the entire article. May I present a blatant repeat of a few paragraphs that seem to have escaped most people's attention ?
In March 2010, a federal judge in Michigan ruled that Thomas Kirschner, facing charges of receiving child pornography, would not have to give up his password. That's "protecting his invocation of his Fifth Amendment privilege against compelled self-incrimination," the court ruled (PDF).
A year earlier, a Vermont federal judge concluded that Sebastien Boucher, who a border guard claims had child porn on his Alienware laptop, did not have a Fifth Amendment right to keep the files encrypted. Boucher eventually complied and was convicted. the article fails to mention this was not his laptop, but government property. He had signed that he would provide access to a govt administrator. So an obvious detail : you can rely on ecnryption, but don't rely on your employer doing it for you. Also : read contracts BEFORE signing them
The article provides a thoughtful conclusion :
Much of the discussion has been about what analogy comes closest. Prosecutors tend to view PGP passphrases as akin to someone possessing a key to a safe filled with incriminating documents. That person can, in general, be legally compelled to hand over the key. Other examples include the U.S. Supreme Court saying that defendants can be forced to provide fingerprints, blood samples, or voice recordings.
On the other hand are civil libertarians citing other Supreme Court cases that conclude Americans can't be forced to give "compelled testimonial communications" and extending the legal shield of the Fifth Amendment to encryption passphrases. Courts already have ruled that that such protection extends to the contents of a defendant's minds, the argument goes, so why shouldn't a passphrase be shielded as well?
First, why not use the obvious countermeasure here. When you create an encrypted volume, you should enter 2 keys, not just one. One will unlock your drive, another will appear to unlock your drive, but in fact deletes the contents of the disk entirely.
Problem is that forensics officers take backups. They'd back up the drive first and boot from the backup so whether it destroys the data or not is irrelevant. And if you gave the officers the "self destruct" password that horked the backup then that is further evidence that you are up to no good.
What you need instead is a hidden volume. The idea is you have a normal OS and a hidden OS where your dirty secrets reside. You are prompted for a password at boot time and the password you enter determines which volume is booted into. Tools like Truecrypt support this already.
The problem is the very fact you are using an encryption tool which supports hidden volumes is likely to raise suspicions that you have a hidden volume even if they cannot prove one exists. At the very least you would have to ensure the decoy volume looks plausible, e.g. you use it frequently for your non incriminating activities, scatter around some sensitive looking but non incriminating documents, all to give the impression that is the one and only volume. The more plausible the decoy is, the more plausible your defence is after you hand over the key.
Even then they might catch you out. by building up a list of inconsistencies of activity shown by the computer's event log and other logs on the HDD vs what they can glean from other logs. e.g. if they might know you were on the internet at such and such a time, or downloaded a particular file, or your phone says it was USB synced at the time yet your OS has no knowledge of these events. Enough inconsistencies combined with evidence of using crypto that supports hidden volumes combined with other evidence they have might still be sufficient to find you guilty.
What you need instead is a hidden volume. The idea is you have a normal OS and a hidden OS where your dirty secrets reside. You are prompted for a password at boot time and the password you enter determines which volume is booted into.
What you need instead is two hidden volumes. The idea being that when you decrypt the normal OS with a tool that supports a hidden volume and people find it squeaky clean, they'll tell you "ha ha now tell us the other password" so you have a hidden OS where your porn resides, and a hidden OS where your dirty secrets reside. Ad nauseum depending on how nauseous your dirty secrets are.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Even then they might catch you out. by building up a list of inconsistencies of activity shown by the computer's event log and other logs on the HDD vs what they can glean from other logs. e.g. if they might know you were on the internet at such and such a time, or downloaded a particular file, or your phone says it was USB synced at the time yet your OS has no knowledge of these events. Enough inconsistencies combined with evidence of using crypto that supports hidden volumes combined with other evidence they have might still be sufficient to find you guilty.
Maybe... But I would submit that their phone likely wouldn't be configured to sync with the "dirty" volume. And, of course, a truly "bad guy" wouldn't be using a smart phone... he'd be using a simple burn phone, dialing all numbers from memory, and calling only other burn phones.
Finally, it seems like a much better idea to use a bootable USB that you encrypt somehow to house your "secret" volume. Boot your machine to the flash drive, when you're not using it hide it somewhere. Done with it? Wipe it, encrypt the blank drive then change the keys and throw it in a river.
Granted, it is slower than booting off your internal SSD/SATA2-3 buuut... you can't always have privacy & convenience.
Who did what now?
This is as so often the silly debating of the law of little kiddies and the reason lawyers in general are so reluctant to discuss law. First year law teachers hate their job because of the constant attempts by students to re-examine the laws that has already been re-examined for hundreds of years by far greater minds then the average student... like cats.
An execution is written down as a murder. Every executed prisoner in the US is a murder victim. Just that the law has ways of allowing such a thing to happen, in certain circumstances while murder in general is forbidden.
You can see kiddies at work when it comes to the police speeding without lights or sirens. Allowed? YES, regardless of what you think the law says, especially traffic law, IF the police has good reasons to do so and with a high expectation of the police not to endanger others. But if the police on their way to a crime scene feel the need to turn of the siren to avoid alerting the criminals and you jump in front of them on a zebra crossing... don't expect much sympathy from a judge.
It is the INTENT of the law vs the actual wording in a changing world. Jews do it all the time, the Sabbath rules are hard to deal with in a modern world of electricity, batteries and essential technology. Can you use an elevator on the Sabbath? In a skyscaper? With a bad heart? It didn't matter when there were no elevators or when the highest floor could be reached by anyone able to survive for that long. But modern medicine has allowed people to continue to live when they became feeble and created housing so high that even top fit humans would need to take a breather.
What about a fridge? Even if you don't use it, you are using it. Food put in before the Sabbath if kept fresh for you by the labour of someone else at the power company. The laws were written in a time before fridges, how do interpret them?
This is an interesting exercise because you avoid the emotional baggage of the 5th and protection against unreonable searches and can focus on a simpler balance (provided you ain't religious yourself) of the "Intent of the law" and the "written law". On the "need" for their being one day of the week in which the people can reflect (except farmers (livestock) of course who never can take a day off) on their god AND the "need" to deal with the parts of the world that cannot be told to wait for one day.
There are of course many types of labor, especially labor itself (woman giving birth) that have not been part of the sabbath rules for millenia, mid-wiving for instance. Taking care of the dead. Health-care in general. And yet, when thousands of years later the standbye mode is inventented, it has to be discussed how this applies to Jews who want to observe the laws of their fate.
Computer encryption is the same to our general law. The intent of the law is that the police when in possession of a search warrant, can search. I had it happen to me, I lived in small room inside a larger house and a warrant had been issued on the house, so my room was searched. Not very thoroughly, they were looking for a person and the room as said was small, but I was still very upset about it AND unable to do anything about it. Because the law was written with an intent, not a complete checklist for every exception.
And if they had found a dozen children in my room, tortured and killed. Could the police have done anything?
THINK carefully, the answer might surprise you. YES and NO... how can that be? They certainly could have launched an investigation HOWEVER it is highly likely you would walk away from it IF there is no way to find any evidence without having to go through the illegally obtained evidence first.
And that sucks... but if they had seen a blank CD that I had payed the fee for artists on... should they be able to launch an investigation?
No, they can't (and wouldn't for that matter) but why?
Because we INTEND the law to weigh the needs of society vs the needs of the individual. There is no way to write this d
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Problem is that forensics officers take backups. They'd back up the drive first and boot from the backup so whether it destroys the data or not is irrelevant. And if you gave the officers the "self destruct" password that horked the backup then that is further evidence that you are up to no good.
A nefarious person could designate a sequence of sectors in various parts of your hard drive as "sectors that will never be read" during the normal course of system operation.
And then patch their hard drive firmware so that if more than 4 of the "off limits" sectors are read, the hard drive will start zero'ing all sectors in the background, and on next power cycle start an ATA Secure erase.
In other words... latent tamper resistant hardware mechanisms implemented such that unauthorized backup attempts result in hardware level self-destruct, so if someone steals the hard drive they can't use it.
Another method of protecting against physical theft of the HDD and passphrase guessing is to utilize online cloud-based services for key distribution.
Instead of the passphrase being used to decrypt the HDD, it gets entered into software, which connects using the internet and makes an API request that results in contacting a number of off-site cloud-based services.
If the passphrase gets entered incorrectly enough times, FAILS to get entered on a certain schedule, or a passphrase with certain characteristics gets entered instead of the correct one, the remote cloud services shut themselves down, and can no longer pass binary data required to derive the HDD decryption keys.
They can also monitor each other and contain an IDS, so if one of them is compromised, it will be ordered to shutdown, and key material required to bootstrap can be incinerated.
e.g. I'm saying the group of all the 'remote cloud security nodes' would form a cooperative group, and for a cloud security node to bootstrap, the other nodes would have to reach an agreement through an election process, and each node would only contain 1/3 or 1/4 of the key material required to reconstruct the HDD decrypt key after presentation of the right passphrase-decoded material from the requestor.
The cloud services can be in disparate geopgrahic locations, even multiple countries, to help reduce the chance of a hacker breaking into a sufficient plurality of those remote providers.
I commend you on your post. It doesn't stray from the fact that once someone physically has your device, it leaves few options to the former owner to remove incriminating evidence no matter the tool used. Eventually, you loose because the deck was never shuffled in your favor.
However, I would like to suggest an alternative. As naive as it may sound, why not just do less illegal stuff? That way when they do take your hard drive, you really don't have anything to get you into trouble. Better yet, if you are so inclined to do illegal stuff, why not just do all that illegal stuff on a different computer that's not located somewhere where you might spend 70%+ of your time.
I think really, if you want to do more illegal stuff on your computer, it may behoove some to take a mafia style approach to computers. Have a front, a fence, and some goons that move more of the illegal action away from you as a person and more towards plausible deniability. For goodness sake, at least if you are going to have a bunch of incriminating evidence deny that you can actually get access to it and that you've gone insane as well, just for good measure.
Nobody ever points out that democrat-appointed judges blocked the repeal of slavery for decades
And fucktards like you forget that the Dixiecrat judges left the Democrat Party in the 1960s and were welcomed into the modern racist GOP with open arms.
Saying that "Republicans" today are what they were over 50 years ago is a plain lie.
A single hidden volume is good enough, maybe better than multiples (I'm not sure there is software which supports more than 2 volumes total, you get into trouble with volumes potentially overwriting each other's contents since they each have to not know about the others). A single hidden volume creates plausible deniability, because the default configuration is no hidden volume.
Now here's the problem with secondary volumes. In order for it to be plausible, you need to keep the red herring volume up to date. It needs to have files with recent timestamps on it and so forth. If they look in there and all the files are out of date and haven't been modified in 6+ months, it's not credible and threatens the plausibility of the denial. It works poorly for whole-disk encryption unless you're very good about doing most of your work in the primary volume, and only booting into the secret volume for short periods of nefarious activity.
It's possible to mount both volumes at once, and just be careful about sticking all the evidence on the secondary volume, but in most modern OS's, there'll be problematic artifacts indicating the secondary volume exists in the form of "Recent Files" lists in applications or in the OS level. You'll also have to worry about program caches being written out to the primary volume and being recoverable from free space on the drive; so as part of shut-down you'll need a script which writes random data to the empty space and knows how to destroy the internal cache files of all your applications - even ones you don't use for nefarious purposes since a cache file may not be zeroed out when it's allocated (thus capturing sensitive data). Basically keeping both mounted at the same time is a sure fire way to accidentally leave behind some evidence on the "safe" drive.
The only safe way to do this is to dual-boot sensitive and non-sensitive volumes. Boot into the sensitive volume only for secret activities, and otherwise be booted up on the non-sensitive volume for everything else. You can see why maintaining multiple red herrings is problematic, and since the plausibility of the denial does not significantly increase, while the chances of leaving behind some indicators of a tertiary volume increases significantly, you're better off with a single hidden volume. As a final note, if you do maintain two red herring volumes, your secondary volume needs to have a reason you'd keep it secret. If there's nothing sensitive on there, it's too obvious of a distraction; you might as well label the volume "red herring."
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
As naive as it may sound, why not just do less illegal stuff?
Who says they are doing illegal stuff? The government's alleging it, but in the ordinary course of events, the 5th Amendment is supposed to protect us against being required to give evidence against ourselves. We are supposed to be presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
And yet, the cops can get away with feeding people information, planting information, and pulling every dirty trick they can come up with to try to get a conviction, innocent or not. The US history books are replete with innocent people railroaded by a corrupt system. The evidence in the Troy Davis case, where police intimidated and coached witnesses and doctored evidence, shows that an innocent man was put to death just recently by the corrupt system.
I'm not advocating doing illegal stuff, but I am suggesting that you probably want to keep your affairs under wraps anyways, even if fully legal. The moment you start waiving one of your rights, courts start ruling you also waived others.
And unless you think I'm joking, consider the case of a police officer coming round to your house because he wants to "ask you some questions." Maybe he claims it's about a neighbor's domestic disturbance. Maybe there was a noise complaint that your dog was barking too loud late at night. Could be any number of things. You let him inside to "talk." Courts in some jurisdictions have ruled that by opening the door and letting him pass the threshold, you just consented to him searching your house for anything he might find suspicious.
Or say you get pulled over by one of the famous Texas "you got a taillight out bud *nightstickcrashbreaknoise*" Badged Highwaymen. You get out of your car but leave it unlocked, or do you lock it and hold on to the keys? In the first case, some courts have ruled that by leaving it unlocked you consented to it being searched!
The point again is: once you start waiving your rights, you wind up giving up others. And it keeps going and going and going. You think you're "cooperating with the police" and that they will like you and not charge you with anything and treat you nice because of it? Bullshit - the police are the initial arm of "evidence gathering" for prosecutors, a set of conscienceless, amoral assholes who see all citizens as nothing more than a potential conviction notch in their belts.
A single hidden volume creates plausible deniability, because the default configuration is no hidden volume.
Except that you still have an encryption system on your hard drive that supports deniable encryption. Governments respond to deniable encryption by attacking its users until people are too terrified to use it, lest it become so commonplace that evidence gathering and prosecution become impossible. The US government is no different; if they can present even the slightest indication that you were using a hidden partition, that will be enough in court: "Here we see ISP logs that show Mr. So-and-so was connected to an email server at 6:45am on the date in question; yet on the logs obtained from the decrypted partition, we see that the computer had not even booted up until 8:00am."
Deniable encryption is like steganography: the warden problem kills you. You cannot hide that you have the capability of using deniable encryption, and judges are not going to let that sort of argument fly (and in some countries, you will be tortured until you produce the evidence or until you cannot speak).
Palm trees and 8
As naive as it may sound, why not just do less illegal stuff?
Who says they are doing illegal stuff? The government's alleging it, but in the ordinary course of events, the 5th Amendment is supposed to protect us against being required to give evidence against ourselves. We are supposed to be presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
Call me naive, but I fail to see the problem with warranted searches. The 5th Amendment doesn't protect us from discovery. You can't physically prevent an officer with a warrant from searching your house. If you have a safe, and the police have a warrant, you *must* give them the key or face obstruction of justice. I fail to see the problem with that, or with being required to give the key to your virtual safe.
multifariam.net -- yet another nerd blog
"is further evidence that you are up to no good."
NO NO NO NO N FUCKING O!
Why is it that people think the 5th is for criminals. Why / How is it that the argument for rights/privacy somehow means guilt?
This is THE worst statement / belief.
KNOW what the hell your talking about.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6wXkI4t7nuc
B-|
A friend will come and bail you out of jail, a true friend will be sitting next to you saying, "damn that was fun!"
What's wrong with cops lying to or misleading suspects?
Aside from the fact that it is KNOWN to make innocent people plead guilty? Aside from the fact that it makes the already dirty cops look that much closer to using forged evidence?
It's a valid tactic...
And if you had this thing called a "conscience" you'd realize it should NOT be valid. Period.
I'm not saying innocent people haven't been railroaded, many have, but reality doesn't permit police (especially in crime-ridden cities) to be knights in shining armor. Crime is an ugly thing, why would trying to solve it be much prettier?
Every time I hear someone like you I want to throw up. What was it our justice system used to be about? Didn't Thomas Jefferson say he would rather a dozen guilty men go free than see one innocent man convicted? When did we abandon our principles?
There is no federal gun registration in the US at all. Any registration is a state matter. Many states do not require registration of any kind. When a gun is lost, stolen, or sold, you are under no obligation to report it to anyone. Most people would report a stolen gun to get insurance and with the hope it would be recovered (they all have serial numbers so it is a realistic possibility).
The government actually has rather little ability to track a gun. Presuming the serial number is left intact (it is a crime to remove them but of course criminals don't care) the authorities can contact the manufacturer and find out which federally licensed firearm dealer it was sold to. They can then contact that dealer and find out who they sold it to (dealers are required to keep records of all sales). However after that, it is all up in the air. If a private individual sells a firearm, they are not required to keep any records at all.
Same deal with a lost firearm. There is no duty to report it. Many people would, I certainly would, but many wouldn't for whatever reason and it is fully legal.
The issue with maintaining two volumes is that each will report lower capacities than the total drive capacity reported through the BIOS or via the label on the drive
This is not how secret volumes work. For one thing, both volumes look like randomized data since everything is encrypted. You can only examine them if you have the decryption key. With the decryption key, both volumes will report their size as the entire allocated space. The primary volume writes data start->end, while the secondary (secret) volume writes end<-start.
For example if you encrypted a 20GB physical drive, both volumes report that they are 20GB. Indeed if you write 20GB of data to either volume, you will OVERWRITE the alternate volume. It's up to you to know how much data you have on each volume and be careful not to write enough data so that the sum of both volumes exceeds the total volume size. You can mount both volumes at the same time, and the encryption software will reject writes to either volume which would overwrite data on the alternate volume.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Sure, physical security offers plenty of advantages over electronic security. But using both is even better. Defense in depth. A physically hidden device can be discovered with no involvement on your part, while an encrypted device with a sufficiently strong key cannot reasonably be accessed without your involvement even if discovered.
The way hidden volumes work, you don't have to try to pretend the card is a different size than it is. Digital forensics won't be fooled by that (they probably won't even look at size on the sticker, the first thing they do is image the device, creating a byte-for-byte copy of the data across the entire space without regard for partitions or other volume information). Hidden volumes occupy the same space as primary volumes. You can have a 16GB drive which consumes all 16GB of space for the primary volume. The hidden volume will occupy some subset of that space, usually writing from the end of the device toward the start of the device, and it can also be 16GB. Of course you can't write 32GB of data to this, if the sum of your primary and hidden volume exceed 16GB, writes will start destroying data on the alternate volume. But without the encryption key, that hidden volume just looks like randomized data in the primary volume's space (it's not possible to distinguish otherwise with any publicly known technique).
Slay a dragon... over lunch!