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Defendant Ordered To Decrypt Laptop Claims She Had Forgotten Password
wiedzmin writes "A Colorado woman that was ordered by a federal judge to decrypt her laptop hard-drive for police last month, appears to have forgotten her password. If she does not remember the password by month's end, as ordered, she could be held in contempt and jailed until she complies. It appears that bad memory is now a federal offense."
The article clarifies that her lawyer stated she may have forgotten the password; they haven't offered that as a defense in court yet.
trivial workaround
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
xkcd.com/538/
Like this, only with less pain and more jailtime...
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
If it works in a congressional hearing investigating potential ethics violations of the Attorney General, why not in a court of law?
How can this woman be charged with contempt? Is there precedent in law to ignore the Fifth Amendment?
No person 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.
I often can't remember my password after a week away from the office on holiday. (And we have quite lax policies regarding passwords, no time, lenght or content limits, so I have a fairly easy one I've been using for months....) I might be hard pressed to remember a password after a month, under dures.s
she honestly can't remember the password. How the hell are they going to rule on that???
http://www.gibby.net.au
If I were in her shoes, I'd claim the same thing. However, this is just going to be a justification for when technology let's "the man" truly read your mind to say there was just cause to do so in order to determine whether she really forgot or just pretended to and all the crazy ethical questions/arguments/fights that will ensue. These days I'm doubting ethics and philosophy can possibly keep up with the pace of technology. I hope I'm wrong!
...you should put all the juicy stuff in plain sight on your harddisk. Then encrypt the stuff you don't care about. When the authorities finally get the password out of you, at least you'll have the satisfaction of confounding them.
I was about to mod your post, but then I realized there's no "Obligatory" option.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Let me ask this (and display my ignorance): If I had a safe and a judge ordered it opened, and I claimed I'd lost the key, would I be held in contempt? Or would it just be forced open? Would this ever see the courtroom at all? Can lawful seizure require active participation of the accused?
If I claim to no longer be in possession of a piece of evidence, and don't know were it is, could I be held in contempt? Couldn't I plead the fifth? "You want to convict me? You go find it."
I'm trying to figure out the stare decisis on this topic (equal and consistent application of the law). It just seems so darn inconsistent.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Anyone who changes their passwords regularly - as we all do ... well should ... well forget to, will tell you that keeping track of them is difficult, and that under duress eg drunk, stoned, in court that they are well nigh impossible to remember.
One file is encrypted
The other one in plain text
If the cops / FBI / or whoever wants to confiscate my HD, the clues on how to decrypt that file is in the plain text file
But there is a catch --- Inside the plain text file I have a brief description and ten (10) urls, which are are links to online password generators.
And the brief description is as followed:
"Passkey is constructed from randomized password obtained from the below 10 urls, have a nice day !"
I did that to protect myself.
1. No matter what the judge ordered me to do, I point to that plain text file
2. I know I can never convince anyone that I forgot the passkey, so I won't tell them that. But I still have an escape clause --I simply can't remember a passkey which was made up from 10 randomized password generator by 10 different online password generators
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Encrypting seems to be indicative of guilt or the need to hide something. The presumption of innocence suddenly does not seem to apply.
Friends of friends often call me about computer problems, and don't know their admin password. They set it when they turn on the box the first time, and forget it. So if it was something like this, I'd actually believe it. If it was something she used every day, I'd be more skeptical. Although, I've heard of folks who temporarily forgot stuff due to traumatic shock. Maybe being in court has wigged her out?
There is one proven judicial method and means to find out if she really forgot it. It's aquatic with a board, but it is not surfing. And definitely no fun.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
she revealed that she, and only she, knew the password to the hard drive over the phone. so her claims she "forgot" are not very plausible. if she hadn't done that, i seriously doubt she would be in this predicament.
If you had a safe and there were reasonable grounds for believing it held incriminating information, then yes, the court could order that it be forced open. If you claim you've lost the key, then no harm has been done to your property as the safe is useless without the key, so you could not claim compensation. Of course, if the other side has evidence that your claim to have lost the key is a false one, then you are going inside for contempt or perjury.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Don't this implicate that police now can jail anyone as they like? Just generate a random file and demand that the accused shall provide a "decyption key". If not they can be held and jailed for contempt?
You mean for the corporation people or the people people?
Yeah. Can you imagine what it would do to business if you're company file server was confiscated for years? It's just plain better business sense to comply. (unless the business is highly illegal anyway, or subject of a witch hunt)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
The fifth amendment is perfectly clear, and he's violated it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I'm pretty sure you guys still have a large portion of the 2nd. Not that it matters though, all the machine guns, rifles and such you can carry don't mean a lot when you're faced with IFVs, main battle tanks and combat aircraft...
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
If you're stupid enough to face them down heads-on, you deserve being trounced. Your tactics must take your resources into consideration and with conventional warfare unfeasible, selective assassination is a very interesting option. Of course, you would never suggest that because your loserboy "reasoning" is a puny excuse to simply do nothing at all. Keep fapping your life away.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
You mean for the corporation people or the people people?
Doesn't matter, really.
What floats the boat can also sinks it
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
A search warrant does not require participation of the defendant. Neither would them cracking the encryption. It crossed the line into a constitutional violation when you begin to threaten people for not aiding their own prosecution: such as requiring someone to disclose the location of incriminating documents, or giving up passwords to encryption keys.
This is little different than demanding that someone accused of a murder disclose the location of the body, or be held in contempt of court: you cannot win either way. Therefore, it is unconstitutional, not a "legitimate legal process." Even were it considered such by the legal system - which it is not - it would still be unconstitutional and a violation of civil rights in need of correction.
You might consider it reasonable, but I think the fact it is possible to easily forget something like a password makes it unreasonable even if there were any sound arguments for violating the 5th.
Great Intellect...
Yes, but due process includes requiring that the evidence subpoenaed exists and is under the control of the recipient. People forget things all the time. Just ask any helldesk person how frequently people forget passwords, even in cases where they have been duly informed that irrevocable data loss will result. If you've forgotten it, it is not under your control.
There exists no way to prove or disprove a claim that a person does not currently remember something. Even the most advanced (and unproven, non-admissible) technology only claims to be able to say if a person is familiar with something they are actually presented with during the test. Even then we can't say WHY it seems familiar. Given that stress and fear are great blockers of recall, it's quite believable.
I have no idea if the defendant REALLY can't remember the password or not. The only person who could possibly know for sure is the defendant.
...so if they throw her in jail for contempt, then doesn't the likelihood of her being able to remember the password decrease over the time of her incarceration, and with it, her ability to comply with the judges orders? If she rides it out for a few months, then isn't her inability to recall her password more credible? I think what this case demonstrates, is the need for a duress password. Enter it and bam. Unrecoverably locked. Then it would be for the prosecution to prove that you deliberately destroyed evidence.
If this stands it means that anyone can be detained indefinitely without trial. All they have to say is "We believe this file is encrypted using stenography, give us the password" and since saying you don't know equals contempt of court tada! Instant disappearing person. Hell with most geeks they wouldn't even have to go that far, how many of you have truecrypt on some disc somewhere? all they'd have to say is "The defendant has truecrypt in his possession and we believe he has a hidden volume, give us the password' and tada! Bye bye geek. don't say it couldn't happen because it wasn't too long ago most of us would have never believed the USA would have free speech zones and rendition taxis either.
Kinda sad that after we spent all those years supposedly fighting the USSR because of freedom the wall falls only for us to slowly but surely become like the USSR.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
In the olden days folks had to eat their notebook pages or hastily burn them as the secret police were knocking on the door. Nowadays that information is likely to be stored in encrypted files and event the best passwords are susceptible to the judicious application of baseball bats. Is it possible to come up with a genuinely destructible password that can be quickly and discretely destroyed forever. My best guess is some kind of keyfile but how could you be sure to delete it in a manner that couldn't be reconstructed?
... all the machine guns, rifles and such you can carry don't mean a lot when you're faced with IFVs, main battle tanks and combat aircraft...
Yeah -- which is to say, we've got a tiny portion of the 2nd amendment.
If I really had something to hide, I'd use key files on a very old USB dongle (128 MB dongle or so). Truecrypt and Bitlocker support this. Then police will most likely raid your house during this whole action. But even if not, when asked to provide the key I'd simply say "this was in a USB dongle. It was laying on my table, so now you tell me where you've put it after messing up my whole house". Or "I had it with me and after my spontaneous arrest I had no idea where you made me forget it". Police might eventually find the donlge, but if they ask what that is, I'd say "that was some old key, no idea for what or what the decryption password is. The key you are looking for was on a new dongle.
Thing is, it is easy to doubt that you know something. But you can get naked and show that you don't have anything hidden between your legs.
I wonder if the "no self-incrimination" clauses could help here.
I am innocent of the allegations.
But my HD contains files which might incriminate me in ways not covered by the claims of prosecution.
By giving the password, I would open myself to prosecution on issues the prosecutor has no clue about.
Therefore I refuse confession that would cause self-incrimination.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I'll take this opportunity to state again, publicly, that I have multiple encrypted disks, partitions and files to which I no longer know the password.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
The laptop was seized in 2010, the order to decrypt is from 2012. I have passwords long enough that I will have trouble remembering them after 2-3 months of not using them. (Happens very rarely.) Not using them for over a year could well make me unable to remember them at all. So I would consider this a real possibility. Not absolute certain, of course, but credible enough that asserting she does still know the password after not having used it for this long would be an unfair disadvantage to her, as she fundamentally cannot prove she does not remember it.
Now the way around this for future cases is key-escrow or requiring everybody to write down their passwords, with the attached huge negative effects. In any sane legislation you can just refuse to give a password. I am amazed that in the self-proclaimed "land of the free" this does not seem to be the case and hope this will just turn out to be a judge that does not understand the issue and will get fixed permanently by a higher court.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Ive been playing with LUKS full disk encryption for a long time before it became a standard install option on the alternate Ubuntu. I must have about 20 encrypted operating system installs on SD cards. I know for a fact that I do not know the passwords for many of these systems sitting in a cabinet. There is some truth to the defence that one can forget passwords. One time I accidentally deleted the luks passphrase from an active operating system. That was bad because I had family pictures on that one I really wanted to keep. In all these cases, I could be just as liable as this defendant. I dont think the courts should be able to assume that memory is always a selective choice. People do forget and the courts just have to find a way to "trick" it out of her if they believe she is lying. Like installing hidden software to monitor keystrokes or otherwise just accept that there is some evidence that just may be to difficult to retrieve.
It's worked pretty well in a number of insurgent wars in the last couple decades. Also, many semi-auto weapons are relatively easy to modify to make automatic fire possible. It's rarely done only because there's little benefit in the face of the legal drawbacks. If one finds themselves on the smaller side of a lopsided war though, the legality of modifying the firearm becomes a relatively trivial consideration compared to the benefits.
I'll take this opportunity to state again, publicly, that I have multiple encrypted disks, partitions and files to which I no longer know the password
No matter how many times or how forcefully you tell them you no longer remember the passwords of the encrypted files, they will not believe you
It's better you have documents to show them how you arrived at the passkeys that you used to encrypt the files
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
What if through some (magical) combination of hardware and software, after say two months, if you didn't log in, the contents became completely irretrievable? Then if you were arrested, you only had to hold out for two months before they would have to release you. Contempt of court means that they can only hold you while you can possibly give them what they need. If it is impossible for you to comply, which would be true after two months, they have to charge you with something else (obstruction of justice?) or release you.
The best work-around is to simply use computers that aren't connected to you.
Not an easy thing to do.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The password is R4ndumbG1bb3r1s# - but I stored the keyfile on megaupload.
Jack: Now let me hear you say the seven most important words in the American judicial system.
Frank: My client has no memory of that.
.....if she finally provided the password only for it to decrypt a bundle of further encrypted files.
Which then decrypt to a load of boring photos, with information encypted into them, and it all turns out to be cake recipes or something.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
store strong passphrase / key file on USB media... if it all goes pear shaped, destroy USB media.
Now, how long do I get jailed for if the key is not retrievable? Surely "indefinite detention" is a violation of human rights somewhere/somehow? Murderers don't even get that.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Goddammit, I'm undoing my mods to post this since you're just blatantly misinformed - and I know you're not the only one. With the exception of a few highly restrictive states like California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, and the non-state of D.C., you can own pretty much anything you want (though due to the Hughes amendment, machine guns must be made prior to 1986). It's a common misconception that silencers, real assault rifles (meaning that you can select between semi-auto and full auto and / or burst fire), machine guns, explosives, rocket launchers, etc are illegal in the US. They're not, you simply have to jump through some hoops to get them, but if you can legally buy a gun, you can legally obtain an NFA (read: restricted) item just fine. It just requires more paperwork, a $200 fee to the ATF for a tax stamp certifying that you legally own the item, and waiting a few months for the ATF to drag their feet on processing the paperwork. Silencers are pretty cheap even - it depends on the caliber, but $800 is a pretty common price. Machine gun prices / real assault rifle prices are artificially inflated by the government though due to the post-1986 ban so a gun that should cost about $2,000 will end up costing more like $15,000 due to the artificial scarcity. Hopefully we can get that fixed one of these days....
Oh, as for "No one sane is going to take on anything with a semi-automatic rifle", the majority of the time the military doesn't even flip their rifles (well, usually carbines to be exact) to burst fire / full auto because it's very hard to control and you burn through your ammo a lot faster without being more effective. As for US citizens being able to fight back against the military? The US military has roughly 3 million soldiers (this counts desk jockeys and members of the reserve as well as the coast guard and national guard) and we'll round up and say 1 million police officers / federal agents (again, counting desk jockeys). The LOW estimate for the number of gun owners in the US is 40 million people with about 90 guns in private hands per 100 people in the country (that includes children), so not only is there a large abundance of weapons and ammo in private hands, but private citizens who own guns outnumber the police and military by around 10 to 1. Sure, they have tanks and bombers, but unless they REALLY wanted to destroy their own infrastructure and a lot of non-combatants on their own side, they wouldn't use them (because even if they won, the country would be totally FUBAR'd for decades).
Note: I'm not promoting or hoping for any conflict between citizens and the military - merely stating some facts regarding the number of people on each side (assuming gun owners all sided together) and how well equipped they are.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
If I get caught, I'll tell them to decrypt it with rot13!
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
The best work-around is to simply use computers that aren't connected to you.
If they want to track you, they can.
Your cellphone is a dead give away where you were and what time you were there, and how much time you spend at a given place
And then they can trace back which computer were at that place at that time
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
You have a very long password you could not possibly remember of the top of your head. You wrote down on paper. You do not have the paper anymore. This at least makes it plausible that you have forgotten the password and removes the possibility you are lying. In practice this works well if the password was a passage for a book, a quote or a saying, or a shopping list, it could easily be overlooked by anyone rummaging through your bits of paper, not an obvious password. Even then only you would know what page and word and number of words to start from in a book for instance. You'd also pass a lie detector test if you had done this.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
No, if they could prove that you knew the password, you could be held in contempt. When you are in court, you are required to present requested evidence. For example, if they know you have the body, you can be compelled to present it. Of course, if they knew you had it, that'd mean they knew where it was, so they wouldn't need to ask for it.
A better analogy would be legal documents which were lost. They knew you had them at one time, but how can they really prove you still have them? Obviously, you can't produce something if you are no longer in possession of it, and they can't hold you in contempt for that.
He can put you in Jail until you purge your contempt by revealing your password.
Legally speaking (sic) you wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Say that it's a 20 character password made up of randomly generated letters and numbers that you can never remember, which is why it was written on the yellow post-it note that was stuck to the side of the screen of the machine they seized. They can't find it ......... "Sorry your honour, all I can say is that it was stuck to the screen when they broke in and took the computer". They can then fruitlessly search the evidence room for the (non-existent) post it note. If they put you under duress, panic visibly and start rattling off related sequences "I'm sure it was BzG5K9b... err, something, something, KU7, something..... oh god".
Sometimes I have created partitions that were encrypted and set up for a project or special purpose or even for an experiment. Then, as time passes and the project fails to hold my interest I do tend to forget the passwords. At least once a year i will tend to completely erase a hard drive and repartition and do an updated install. Before doing that i transfer some files to another drive for safety and then remove that drive from the PC until the new install is completed. I have also used a lot of quick change hard drive trays so I may lose track of where a encrypted segment is or on what drive it was on.
It is hard to imagine that any judge could punish simply because you could not recall the drive, the segment or the password that the court wishes to see. In twenty years time I have used hundreds of passwords and currently own about 15 drives. I have never done anything that would vaguely interested police.
I'll take this opportunity to state again, publicly, that I have multiple encrypted disks, partitions and files to which I no longer know the password.
Then zero them as it can get really nasty when the feds demand the password.
I think that before long it will be a crime to forget to celebrate the dear leader's birthday...
And I mean that for whichever country you might live in.
... but private citizens who own guns outnumber the police and military by around 10 to 1.
You really think that an organized military and police force can be stopped by citizens (including grandma) with their .38 S&W? How would you stop a convoy of tanks and humvees? Your argument also assumes that the whole population rises up at the same time and unites. That rarely ever happened in world history.
Anyway, this is a completely nonsense argument. If a lot of citizens are scared they will happily vote for someone who puts away the "bad guys" behind bars for decades, even for minor things like drug possession. And the people who want to "rise up" are the first ones locked away...
Surely forgetting your password is perfectly legitimate.
Ask any first line corporate helpdesk staff member what the most common problem is, and I bet it's users forgetting their passwords and locking themselves out. Virtually every website has a link to automate the reset process. People forget their passwords all the time.
OK, I accept it's less likely that you'll forget the password to access your home PC, but I've done that, been there, had to reboot from a recovery disk - if the data was encrypted I'd have lost access to it.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
I infer that you meant to type imply and not implicate.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Is two keys that can be used. One key, the correct key, correctly decrypts the drive. If the other is used it deletes all the data you really wanted to hide and replaces it with pictures of the american flag, patriotic banners, proposals for drafts for laws that will crack down on terrorism and piracy and other stuff like that. Then you say you kept it all encrypted because there are lots of crazy people out there that are against this sort of stuff and that you are really on their side.
If it was something she used every day, I'd be more skeptical.
If the laptop was conviscated a while ago, she wouldn't be using the password every day for a while.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Perhaps her password was "ICantRemember".
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
The law should require people to store their encryption passwords so they won't forget them. Preferably in an encrypted file.
no, I don't have a sig
Currently I don't have something, which really need encryption. However, should it ever be necessary I'd modify after each use the timestamps so it looks like the container was last accessed years ago. Within sensible limits, of course. It would be much more believable to have forgotten a password, when the last access was several month ago than when the timestamps says it was accessed last week or even yesterday.
What we have today is differing opinions among the different Federal circuits in the United States. In some circuits, it has been opined by the courts that a person cannot be forced to give up passwords, because doing so would violate their 5th Amendment Right against self-incrimination.
In this woman's circuit, the courts ruled that a person must cooperate with police in helping secure their own conviction.
SCOTUS needs to bitch-slap this court back to law school whole simultaneously setting a uniform standard throughout the land.
In any conflict of such an magnitude, where the US military is outnumbered, things like logistics, troop movements and proper command structure will play a MUCH more important role than what guns the each side has. You can't really argue that a rag-tag militia can compete with a trained army in these aspects.
Now, guerilla warfare is a completelly different matter, of course.
In the UK, being inebriated or having an alcohol or other drug dependency is often used as a mitigating circumstance in court and results in lesser sentences.
the one fact you did not raise.
In any armed uprising in the United States your bound to have many of those military and police on the side of those resisting the government. Having been in the military and know friends still in it, there is America and there is the Government. You serve the later versus foreign enemies, your serve the former at all times.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Yeah, they don't care. You can play your stupid games in a jail cell while they wait. There's no time limit on contempt, so if you don't remember, that's fine, you'll just sit in jail literally the rest of your life.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
well, even you cooperate to the fullest to get your property/equipment/data back there are MANY MANY stories of police refusing
to return things, or when finally forced to do so, the equipment has suffered mysterious inexplicable damage.
any equipment/data confiscated by police must automatically be assumed lost.
offsite backups are wise for many reasons, this is one.
Nineteen hijackers and a couple of middle-aged rich kids with daddy issues managed to drag hundreds of thousands of highly-trained military personnel and a couple trillions dollars into a ten-year conflict that killed thousands of people, sent one country back to the stone age, destabilized another, and undermined the basic constitutional underpinnings of the most powerful country on Earth. And it still isn't even clear who "won." I don't think you can predict these sort of things based purely on the number of things or people on each side.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
I wonder if you can be charged with destruction of evidence before you have been informed by the court etc that some thing you have is evidence.
- Raynet --> .
All they have to say is "We believe this file is encrypted using stenography, give us the password"
Yeah, it's those stenographers and their suspicious-looking keyboards. They're bound to be up to no good. It seems like they've infiltrated every court in the land, too.
Burns: We're building a casino!
McAllister: Arrr. Give me 5 minutes.
"I have no idea if the defendant REALLY can't remember the password or not. The only person who could possibly know for sure is the defendant."
And even she might not know for sure at this point. She can have a password in her mind, but when she tries it she finds that it doesn't work. After all, she hasn't used the particular computer in 2 years.
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
One of the things is that if it ever got so bad that the people were rising up in large numbers against the government, the government could never muster enough manpower to have a presence in every town and city.
It might be difficult for the people to win back control of the whole country, but it would be impossible for the government to do it.
This type of situation has presented itself many times in many regions of the world. Governments being reduced to a small territory during a revolution or civil war is a common theme in history (Republic of China vs The Peoples Republic of China, for example), but also wars between countries often end up with the winning side having too much territory to effectively control so they end up having to give a lot of it back.
Also, the pretense that the military will be a united entity during a revolution or civil war is sketchy at best.
"His name was James Damore."
In the UK, being inebriated or having an alcohol or other drug dependency is often used as a mitigating circumstance in court and results in lesser sentences.
Yeah, it's a well known defence * in the UK to swallow a bottle of brandy after you've run someone over in your car and then explain to the arresting officers that you were drunk, so they can just let you off lightly.
* If you live in a total fantasy world.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I don't think so. I things have to be accepted by the judge as legal evidence. If nothing exists, it's technically not evidence.
You mean like the insurgents in Iraq who have killed about 5,000 US troops despite being out-gunned, out-numbered and not having the same training as our soldiers? You forget that many of the civilians in that "rag-tag militia" are also US military veterans and have the same training and even more combat exposure than many active duty soldiers. Many of our veterans have a hell of a lot more practical combat skills and experience than our police; the average infantry veteran is easily at the same level as a SWAT officer. In an open fighting, the police would get their asses kicked two ways to Sunday and back by armed veterans who meant business.
Drill a hole, then you'll see it.
They don't need to "win." The US military isn't going to simply destroy its own entire nation to "win." There only needs to be enough resistance to force the government to significantly change policies, and that would be relatively easy given the level of armament in private hands.
If you've been using an encrypted hard drive regularly for years, forgetting the password the very day the police seize it may be technically possible but it's not reasonable doubt. Nothing can ever be proved beyond doubt, just beyond reasonable doubt.
This space intentionally left blank
The US government has been at war with somebody, somewhere in the world, every single year of the past 100 years. The 9/11 attacks hardly changed a thing regarding war and global militarization. 9/11 merely provided a brand new justification for yet even more war, yet even more power over the people, and (most imporantly) yet even more spending.
You don't actually believe it's about something other than money, do you? Money is at the root of everything government does.
Seems strange that this showed up under it.slashdot instead of yro.slashdot. This itself seems an ominous sign of shifting trends. YRO category is becoming obsolete!
You also assume that the police will always be on the side of the government. I don't care who pays me, I'm not killing my grandma!
I type in the password to my computer at work every day, but after two weeks' vacation, I tend to forget it. Sometimes I forget it despite having used it the day before, for no apparent reason. Sometimes I even remember it again after an hour, still, for no apparent reason. To a court, that could easily seem like I was lying about forgetting it.
And contempt doesn't even need that necessarily. It's at a judges discretion. They could choose to hold you, and if it was determined you'd never give it up by the judge, they could turn-around and release you.
The fact that contempt can be arbitrary was part of Scalia's thinking in the legitimacy of torture. The 8th amendment is specific about punishment, contempt (and interrogation) are not about punishment, therefore it does not apply. This (in his mind) makes enhanced interrogation the domain of the legislative branch to ban or permit.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
There is a super shitload of ammunition in private hands. Citizens won't have to worry about supply because they've been stocking up already and because they won't be using a lot of suppressive fire, which is how you burn through it quickly. There's a lot more guns in private hands than the official estimates, too, because so few are registered and so many have come into the country by unofficial channels, like every other country :p
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You can't really argue that a rag-tag militia can compete with a trained army in these aspects.
That's exactly what General Gage said!
(Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes.)
Disclaimer: Evolution comes with NO WARRANTY, except for the IMPLIED WARRANTY of FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
JUDGE: I demand you decrypt this file we found on your Linux computer. /dev/random file on your laptop. Police forensic experts swear it is a encrypted file that is huge in size, they have been copying it for 3 days now.
Defendant: I cant it's not a file.
JUDGE: I know it is a file. YOu are in Jail until you provide the password to your
JUDGE: Take him away until he gives us the password.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I know of a particular case where a person had used the alford plea. The judge ordered the defendant to handover all passwords to his personal computer. He claimed he could not remember the passwords. It did not turn out so great. He was charged with a Felony of unlawful access of computer equipment and sentenced to 5 years of probation. These things never turn out well due to a lack of understanding by the jury and the justice system. They even labled him as a hacker, all he did was work occasionally from home on his personal computer (there was no policy against this). She is in far worse shape due to the nature of her charge. They are going to probably make an example of her too, especially given the nature of what she is accused of.
I think they could start treating encryption like alcohol: if you kill someone while drunk, you can't use alcohol as defense. When you consumed the alcohol, you assumed legal responsibility for your future actions. And if you refuse the blood test, the court is going to assume the worst.
In other words, if you encrypt and forget the key, the court could, under suitable legislation, assume the worst and penalize you accordingly. You wouldn't have to incriminate yourself -- you'd be guilty of grossly negligent encryption, whose maximum penalty could be life without parole.
That makes the punishment grossly disproportional to the offence. You could go to jail for years for forgetting the password to your password manager.
If people were robots that never made mistakes, it could work, but in the real world, it would be horribly unjust, and it'd be a horrible waste to take away years of people's lives (plus the cost of jailing them).
This is not a matter of "producing" the documents -- the prosecution has them, in the form of an encrypted hard drive. This is a matter of helping the prosecution decypher the documents.
To put it another way, suppose there were only two possible documents on the hard drive, one incriminating, the other exonerating. Given only ciphertext for one of those documents, the prosecution cannot say which document was encrypted. Given ciphertext plus a passphrase, the prosecution can make a case that it was the incriminating document (assuming it was). Demanding the passphrase from the defendant is like demanding the defendant explain difficult to understand parts of the document, which is unquestionably demanding that the defendant testify against themselves.
Oh wait, it is involves super-duper-secret-spy-stuff (cryptography) and magical computers, so we are supposed to dispense with logic and rely only on bad metaphors that help the prosecution's case. That poor, poor prosecutor, whose case is weak without violating the fifth amendment.
Palm trees and 8
Yes because discipline, training, a strong command structure, and clearly better equipment never won a battle against the odds.
The US military would win against its citizens at odds 100/1, 10/1 would not even be a real fight. Within a day the entire country would be under military control.
The only chance would be long drawn out guerilla warfare.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Isn't it just way simpler to divide the nation into 2 ideological factions and raise enmity between them to avoid a unified front against organized forces?
oh wait...
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
And for every one killed, depending on what statistic you read, it can be anywhere form 20 to 300 dead Iraqi.
You are the only one I have ever met who seems to think that Iraq won the war, I think it is you who might have been under a rock for the last 10 years.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Ronald Reagan was allowed to conveniently "forget" how he betrayed our country by telling Iran to hold US citizens hostage until after he was in office, and how he then sold arms to Iran to fund a secret and illegal war against the Contras, which employed US soldiers, and about which Congress was never notified. That seems a whole lot more worth jail time than what this chick did.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
The outcome of that scenario depends on how many of the common citizenry are willing to die.
40 million suicidal maniacs with guns trumps the 5 million trough-feeding welfare recipients that comprise our armed forces and constabulary.
http://thylacosmilus.blogspot.com/search?q=booze
DUI is the one case where this doesn't come into play. But frequently GBH, ABH, robbery and theft are mitigated with booze or drug related issues.
Logistics. Operating in this country, the US military relies a LOT on civilians. Not just DoD and contractors, but regular civilian companies. How are spare parts delivered? FEDEX. "Sorry, General, the truck went into the river."
And with the spare parts, many, many things are simply remove and replace boxes at the unit level. The broken ones are sent back to the factory or depot for low level repair. If the supply on base runs out, the jets don't fly anymore.
And as far as trained troops...there are a LOT of people out here with recent, relevant military experience.
1) Defrauding down on their luck folks out of their homes
2) Setting precedent that will put folks who are honestly forgetful behind bars
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
And as a poster above has said, semi-auto or full-auto isn't terribly useful anyways. Play any realistic FPS and you'll notice the same thing yourself. Anyone who does this mod is either doing it as a shooting range novelty or to "stick it to the man."
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Surely if a defendant lost a key to a (real) lock, the court would order a deputy of the court to force the lock open. In this case, the court could ask an expert to try and decrypt the contents or "force the lock open".
Yes, most encryption is not really breakable in reasonable time limits, but what if that "real" lock was just as good? Can a defendant be made to produce a key that may no longer exist?
There is no difference between a "real" key and one that only exists in your head. If both are lost, a court can not reasonably "force" them to be produced.
Here is a real-world example of why ALL of our elected representatives MUST be proficient in the ways of technology. There are very real consequences to electing technological idiots to office.
-ted
Did they try hunter2?
Relax gun nerds, I see my mistake. s/semi-auto/burst fire/g
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
My understanding is that the police do not need to know the difference. All a prosecutor needs to show is that there is reasonable evidence to assume that something illegal is there.
Police officers do not need to know the contents of your house to get a search warrant - all they need to show is reasonable evidence that there may be something illegal going on there.
-ted
I love how you persist in this idiotic delusion.
Judge: Show us the partition we're asking for.
Taco Cowboy: They're encrypted using a password that was derived from a very interesting algorithm using multiple...
Judge: I find you in contempt. See you in a few days. If you don't present it then you'll stay in contempt.
TC (being carried away): But but but but the algorithm!
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
I use a smart card. And I seem to have lost it.
And it still isn't even clear who "won."
Of course it's clear who won: no-one. There are no winners in war. Just one party that loses even more than the other.
Yeah! No one's going to, say, burn down ATLANTA just because some guys decide they don't want to be in the union any more!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
unless the password was long, and written on a paper, which the police managed to lost......
Perfect logic only applies in the world of perfect theory, where silly things like common sense need not apply.
Yes, by having the encrypted drive, the prosecution does technically possess the documents. Of course, they do not possess the documents in any usable form.
The point of discovery is to bring everything, incriminating or not, before the court, after which the prosecution and the defense will offer theories of what happened, supported by the evidence. It's not the actual possession of a physical document that matters. It's whether the information it contains is shown to the court. Refusing to show information to the court, regardless of whether such information is incriminating or not, is itself a criminal act, namely one of not following the legal process. Similarly, resisting arrest is a separate crime, because you're not following due process.
demanding the defendant explain difficult to understand parts of the document, which is unquestionably demanding that the defendant testify against themselves.
That's questionable. A testimony is a statement of truth regarding a matter, and the defendant is not necessarily making any such statement. Let us follow the hypothetical case of a bombing. The defendant in the trial is a chemist, asked to explain a shopping list of chemicals. The defendant chemist explains that the chemicals named would, when properly combined, explode. That is an explanation, but the chemist is not testifying against himself. There is no assertion that the chemist wrote the list, or purchased the named chemicals, or assembled the bomb.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
You can't really argue that a rag-tag militia can compete with a trained army in these aspects
Try again. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolutionary_War
....be sure to have plenty of emails to Symmantec (or a LUKS or GPG or whatever) user group / customer support asking how to decrypt a file to which you have forgotten the password to.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm pretty sure you guys still have a large portion of the 2nd
Try living in Massachusetts. Carrying a gun outside the home is almost impossible now.
If you know it could be used as evidence to incriminate you, of course you can. It happens all the time when companies shred incriminating financial documents before they are caught.
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, though I'm not yet sure about the universe. - A Einstein
Machine gun prices / real assault rifle prices are artificially inflated by the government though due to the post-1986 ban so a gun that should cost about $2,000 will end up costing more like $15,000 due to the artificial scarcity. Hopefully we can get that fixed one of these days....
Serious question: Why would you want to get that fixed? I am quite fine with very few people being able to obtain assault rifles and machine guns. In fact, I'm profoundly thankful for it. I fully support the rights of being able to own guns, but an assault rifle has only one real purpose: Firing at human beings. And there are definitely people out there that would use them for that purpose in because their nuts. With hand guns, rifles, and shotguns, they can't mow down a crowd because they think differently. Besides that, you even state that the automatics are generally used sparingly because of ammo usage and aim issues. So why would untrained civilians need them in a time of revolution/riot/uprising/whatever-you-call-it?
A gun that can fire so quickly and do so much damage should not be readily accessible. People may have a right to bear arms, but every person has a right to live.
I think he is stating the problem that I myself have: ancient media that contains encrypted data that is languishing in my office (the cellar is too moist, and I don't have an attic). I no longer remember the passwords for those disks, since I haven't used them for years now. A judge out to screw me over could use this to have me held in contempt if for any reason they would be confiscated as evidence, regardless of the merits of the case.
Wow you apparently know nothing of urban combat.
We used all that in Afghanistan against machine gun toting, ide using, rpg carrying terrorists, and how long have we been there?
The problem with urban warfare is figuring out who is the enemy and who is a noncombatant.
Should the US citizens ever decide to revolt against the government it would be the worst war the government has engaged in since the Civil War.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
They don't need to "win." The US military isn't going to simply destroy its own entire nation to "win." There only needs to be enough resistance to force the government to significantly change policies, and that would be relatively easy given the level of armament in private hands.
Also understand that the US military is made up of volunteer civilians. Sure, some in the US military will be willing to fire on US citizens, but I seriously doubt that number will be more than half. While I don't expect a lot of grunts shooting their officers, I would expect an awful lot to not return from guard duty.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
It's not the actual possession of a physical document that matters. It's whether the information it contains is shown to the court.
That is an explanation, but the chemist is not testifying against himself. There is no assertion that the chemist wrote the list, or purchased the named chemicals, or assembled the bomb.
Perhaps it is just my limited legal knowledge, but I am not seeing how a defendant being compelled to explain the information in a document, which is then submitted as evidence against the defendant, is not a violation of the fifth amendment. If a drug dealer was in court, could the prosecution demand that the drug dealer explain the meaning of slang terms that refer to drugs, and then use that explanation while presenting a wiretap transcript?
By asking for a decryption key, the prosecution is asking for information that will be used, in combination with the ciphertext, as evidence against the defendant. Perhaps I have too much faith in the fifth amendment, but I am not seeing how demanding that a defendant explain the meaning of a document -- whether by definition words or by providing a decryption key -- is not a fifth amendment violation.
Palm trees and 8
I'd mod you up had I the points. People would use hunting rifles if they had to. 2 or 3 kills with a hunting rifle could net you a few handguns grenades and some assault rifles. Not to mention ammo and rations.
The biggest issue for those troops fighting that war would not be from sniping, but that person that walked in a crowd right into your face and pulled a weapon. You can't rightly shoot into an unarmed crowd can you?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
The biggest threat would be those who think like the poster below. There would be those in both the military and police force that would not agree with the government and supply both weapons and intel to the opposing faction.
How then do you stop an enemy you can not identify?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
No person ... 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;
Nobody is required to be a witness against himself without due process of law. The court determines what falls under due process, and here has found that the unencrypted contents are required for the trial. The fifth amendment's promise is upheld.
The fifth amendment protects against the $5-wrench solution to encryption, because that would clearly be violating due process. It tangentially protects against saying something in a courtroom against yourself, because you may not have had a chance to discuss your response with your legal advisers, and therefore may face an unjust disadvantage. It does not mean the prosecutors have to produce all of the evidence for a trial on their own.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
But the prosecutor could argue that while she might not actually remember the whole password she could at least remember some of it. I know that for all my lost passwords I could remember several parts of it but not the whole. This might narrow the search down and make it less time-consuming, or am I wrong? She could for example say that it was 15 characters long (both upper and lowercase, numbers etc.) and that the first two letters are a2. That might help them to decrypt it faster.
You forget that the Iraqi's are massively outnumbered - in a US civil war, it would be the military who's outnumbered...not to mention that plenty of citizens in the US spend a LOT of time practicing and are very good shots.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Maybe your cellphone is. Mine is actually capable of being left on my dresser at home when I don't want to receive calls or be tracked.
Although we are probably too far down the rabbit hole for this to matter, I think a view on why we have the 5th amendment and what it supposedly protects us from is in order. It would seem that courts from the 15th-16th centuries, as I recall from history, were in the witch-hunt era. During that time the practice of placing the accused on trial and forcing them to admit to their crimes or face punishment was pretty common. The 5th amendment was directed at these trials I believe. That no person would be compelled to provide testimony against themselves. Since there is no way to foresee what could be used as testimony against someone, it was basically deemed that the defendant had the right to say nothing at all, placing the burden of evidence on the accuser, not the accused. While we argue gymnastics of legal precedence, the concepts of this password disclosure should really revolve around the right of the defendant to remain silent.
This is not a matter of "producing" the documents -- the prosecution has them, in the form of an encrypted hard drive.
No they don't. What they have is an arrangement of bits. The bits are not the document. The bits + the passkey = the document. In their current form, the bits do not represent the document in a meaningful way.
If the document were a paper document, it would not be the actual paper that they are looking for. The paper is meaningless. A photocopy of the document on a different piece of paper would suffice, assuming it could be guaranteed that it was a true, complete, unaltered copy. It's the contents of the document that matter. They do not currently have those contents. They just have a meaningless arrangement of bits.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
There was a report done recently by some university research group (if you care I could do some searching and track down the source) and it said that out of the roughly 825 million known guns in existence on the planet, over 1/3 of them are in the hands of private non-military / law enforcement citizens in the US.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Yeah, they don't care. You can play your stupid games in a jail cell while they wait. There's no time limit on contempt, so if you don't remember, that's fine, you'll just sit in jail literally the rest of your life.
I think you could make the argument that the punishment for contempt shouldn't greatly exceed the crime you were being charged with. It might therefore make sense to sit in jail for contempt rather than to divulge information which would prove you guilty of a more serious crime than the one you were charged with.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
If shit were to happen here, you can bet your butt the DoD would use tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of cold-blooded (even foreign) mercenaries, who have no sentiments worth preserving. NATO troops would almost certainly be involved and so could a UN "peace keeping" force.
ALl of these segments have been training, for two or three decades now, on American soil, and none of them would have problems killing Americans.
That's the point!
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
Unless the police gave you a concussion when they beaned you with that wrench.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I swore this over 16 years ago, and once more since then, and still believe it.
I, (name redacted), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.
Any member of govt that decides they are above the constitution in my eyes, is an enemy of the constitution.
I'll wait to be detained, I'm sure it will happen soon.
They just have a meaningless arrangement of bits.
No, that would imply that she gave them random bits. They could, given sufficient computer time, brute force her passphrase and decrypt the document. Those bits are not meaningless; they do actually encode the document, the prosecution just wants her to give them a shortcut to decoding it.
Now, if she were using a one time pad, perhaps what you said would make sense. Except that then she could give them anything and claim it was a key, and there would be no way to show otherwise.
Palm trees and 8
Logistics has very little to do with ammunition. The absolute hardest part of maintaining troops is feeding them and removing the waste. A disrupted supply line can be disastrous for a fighting force. It is a hell of a lot easier to take on the best army in the world if they haven't had food or clean water for 5 days.
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The point about veterans is an important one. But it also seems obvious to me that if the US military was ever ordered to fire on the American people in such a way as to constitute a revolution, the main force that would end up fighting against the US military would be a huge portion of defectors from within it. US soldiers are US citizens, and probably most of them have families of some sort or another. Things have gotten pretty shitty in terms of legislation, but I'm still a long way from believing that if asked to, the military would simply comply with an order to assault US civilians.
In most places in America, yes, you can. In wannabe dictatorships like New Jersey, no, but the majority of the states allow it. Hell, half a dozen states don't even require you to have a permit to carry a concealed gun. Also, an increasing number of states are passing laws / having state supreme courts rule that local governments (county, city, township, etc) cannot pass guns laws more restrictive than the state gun laws. Very few states ban NFA items and those that do usually only ban one or two particular types of NFA items (such as explosive devices). Oh, and if you think a handgun is expensive, then you need to go back to school so that you'll have the necessary skills to get a below-average paying job and be able to afford a handgun.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Torture isn't judicial.
Regardless of whether she forgot it or not, I think its wrong to even ask her to decrypt the drive. I agree with Justice Stevens,
"Fingerprints, blood samples, voice exemplars, handwriting specimens, or other items of physical evidence may be extracted from a defendant against his will. But can he be compelled to use his mind to assist the prosecution in convicting him of a crime? I think not. He may in some cases be forced to surrender a key to a strongbox containing incriminating documents, but I do not believe he can be compelled to reveal the combination to his wall safe - by word or deed."
Whether she "forgot" or not shouldn't matter; anybody in this situation would say they forgot. You should be protected under the 5th and shouldn't be asked to do so in the first place. This is no different than demanding that a possible murderer admit that he killed someone or be held for contempt. It defeats the entire point of the law process.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
I understand why the judge is holding her in contempt if she fails to decrypt. The fact is that he can't physically make her do it. But that simple fact should be a key reason why you can't order people to do it.
An unenforceable law is a stupid law. It's like laws against suicide... how are you going to stop anyone from doing it and how are you going to punish them after they did it?
It's a dumb law.
The real problem is how to do you catch bad people that have incriminating evidence locked by encryption?
You could make strong encryption illegal... but all of that seems unlikely to stand.
Its an interesting issue. I feel for the judge here... he's in an impossible situation.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It's worked pretty well in a number of insurgent wars in the last couple decades. Also, many semi-auto weapons are relatively easy to modify to make automatic fire possible.
These statements are completely incongruent. Full auto is a great way to turn ammo into noise. Only the untrained or those in panic mode opt for full auto fire.
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Exactly, memory is extremely fickle. The brain tries to prioritize memories and delete anything that isn't important, so after she stopped using the password daily she very well could have just forgotten it. I've forgotten a password I used on Friday (and had been used daily up until) on Monday. Just gone.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
Yes, I know suppressor is the official term, but most people would say "huh?". And yes, $300 is normal for a .22, but for a real gun like a .30-06, they're more like $800. :-) I'm mostly kidding about the real gun thing - I'll get a .22 someday to save on ammo, but I prefer guns that can be used in combat if necessary - hence most of my guns being military surplus. Besides being illegal, the Hughes Amendment was put in place purely to distort the legal actions of citizens by artificially increasing prices to absurd levels, which is highly corrupt, if not illegal in itself.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
You are missing a couple of points about this case. The woman acknowledged that it was her laptop at the beginning of this whole thing. She even acknowledged knowing the password. A judge ordered her to decrypt the hard drive (legally the equivalent of a judge issuing a search warrant). She appealed that order on the basis of the Fifth Amendment. Higher courts ruled against her.
That does not mean that this could not end up where you say it will, but it is no where near that yet. The way the higher courts ruled, it is likely that if she had denied that the laptop was hers, or if only part of the hard drive was encrypted and she had claimed to not know the password for the encrypted portion, she would have been able to use a Fifth Amendment defense against demands for the password. In those cases producing the password would have been self-incrimination since it would reduce her ability to claim that she did not have knowledge of the files found on the hard drive.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Why would I want it fixed? Because it's the government screwing with the market to try to prevent people from obtaining something that is 100% legal to own, with the primary purpose of trying to ensure that the military has superior firepower in case of civil war - which is pretty immoral to intentionally be planning on how best to murder your citizens. Why are you afraid of machine guns? They're essentially never used in crimes (you'd have to search a long time to find the last recorded use of one in a crime in the US) and as I said before, they're highly impractical. A semi-automatic weapon would be much more useful for killing large groups of people because you can still fire quite rapidly and you would kill more people with the same number of bullets (with full auto multiple bullets would hit each person, causing you to have to reload quite quickly - a 30 round magazine on full auto will last about 4 seconds). You want to use fear as a reason to ban them, yet it's a very small minority of people who use guns in crimes and it's often the SAME PEOPLE due to our catch-and-release justice system that returns dangerous people to society while trying to disarm innocent law abiding citizens.
People have the right to a full auto weapon because no one gets to define what another person "needs". Just like you have the right to buy a full size SUV, which I find wasteful and foolish. It's not about need, it's about want. You don't NEED an iPhone. You don't need a laptop. You want them because you enjoy them. I know people who own Uzi's (real, full auto ones) and they own them because they're FUN to go out and shoot a bunch of shit on the range / in the backyard (assuming a rural area), but they rarely shoot them because of the cost of ammo. A gun does not magically kill people - and you're being utterly intellectually dishonest by claiming that law abiding citizens having more guns would magically turn them into killers. Your argument is based on nothing but irrational fear, likely due to not having much experience around guns.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
... but private citizens who own guns outnumber the police and military by around 10 to 1.
You really think that an organized military and police force can be stopped by citizens (including grandma) with their .38 S&W? How would you stop a convoy of tanks and humvees? Your argument also assumes that the whole population rises up at the same time and unites. That rarely ever happened in world history.
Do you really think the military, in some portion, will not side and fight with the people?
Being a spelling & grammar Nazi is a sign you do not poses the intelligence to contribute to the conversation
Yes, but will you kill my grandma?
You can't really argue that a rag-tag militia can compete with a trained army in these aspects.
Funny, if you look at history, they said the same thing when America went to war with England.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
You've seen phase one. The courts are split on the issue of whether or not a person can be compelled to provide their password. That's what the arguments have been about, so far.
Okay. The Lady has been compelled. Her lawyer says that she doesn't remember the password. The burden is on the prosecutor to prove that she does remember. How is the prosecutor going to meet that burden without putting the lady on the stand and having her testify about her mental state (memory)? No question about it, that would be a BIG 5th Amendment no-no.
That is why software like truecrypt has option of making hidden encrypted drives, while showing unencrypted content.
The only problem I see with it however, is that under intelligent scrutiny (which the police may or may not have), it is discoverable, and at that point you have the same problem with contempt of court. You have to make it however more plausible that it does not exist.
So for instance you might be able to hide a 3MB crypt on a 2TB drive. However any amount of close scrutiny will find it. If you have 1.5TB hidden on a 2TB drive, it will be more apparent. You can spoof the OS to report incorrectly likely, but that would be more involved I would think. Also if you have multiple drives hooked up to your computer that are "unformatted" it may be enough evidence to suggest you actually have encrypted drives.
Anyway I am not expert, but I expect the best defense is them not even knowing or suggesting that you might have anything encrypted to begin with. Another possibility would be encrypted offsite storage in cloud... Though that has its own security issues. It has been suggested before however, to simply keep secure copies of whatever you need online (talk of industrial espionage), come into the country with a laptop containing no sensitive data, then once in country simply connect to your secure server, download and decrypt, use data and delete before crossing boarder again. If your really paranoid (a la the cryptonomicon) don't ever save anything to your hard drive, load it all into RAM and download and decrypt each time, blowing away the lot each time you turn off your laptop. Ease of use and laziness VS security is the usually ratio to be evaluated as to how important one is to the other.
When you are in court, you are required to present requested evidence.
Data from my brain is not evidence, it is testimony. Self-incriminating testimony is protected by the 5th amendment.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Well, they wouldn't be asked to assault US civilians. They would be told to assault crazy terrorists who, by the way, have been threatening their families and loved ones. The one thing we're good at is controlling information access for our troops. Sure there are a few that think the Iraq was a bad thing, but most are quite proud of what we've "accomplished" over there.
Remember Abu Ghraib, the only way that happens is significant informational and psychological conditioning to dehumanize the 'enemy'. That can happen for anyone they fight, anywhere on earth, including inside our borders.
It was a soldier who was ordered to kill a us citizen in a drone attack, and did so without hesitation.
You parse the sentence incorrectly. You can never be compelled to be a witness against yourself (constitutionally speaking). At least part of the motivation for this protection was the torturing to produce confessions, etc. But it was made an absolute protection. Subjecting this protection to "the due process of law" makes this protection mostly meaningless.
That fact is we no longer respect this constitutional limitation.
Try bringing half a litre of orange juice onto an airplane, and you'll see who won.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
They would have killed a lot more were it not for the fact that marksmanship has faded from the arab world after their conversion to the AK47 and all it's clones. The russians were scared shitless of their marksmanship in Afghanistan, but now that skill is relegated to a very few of their snipers. The rest of them couldn't hit the broad side of a barn.
A 1 week vacation was enough for a coworker to forget his passphrase on his work desktop.
Clearly, a week in jail could be enough.
Too bad she doesn't have actual medical proof as I do on memory problems. I have been tested many times by medical professionals and results are the same that I have severe memory problems. I have good days and bad days. It is the result of brain surgery for a brain aneurysm, then being over radiated three months later to my head and neck for cancer. Today is a good day for me so far, but I have had people ask me their passwords for when I worked on their computer a couple of years before...ye right lol I have people write their passwords down when I work on their computers, as many times I have to look at the password they wrote down every time I login to their computer. She may or may not remember the password, but they will have to PROVE she can't remember it. It is not contempt of court if they think they have evidence against her, it is up to THEM to provide it, not her. If she is saying 'If you think there is something there, you're welcome to it, but I don't know how to get into it' She is cooperating in the fact that in what they think is evidence, she has given it to them for THEM to determine if it is incriminating evidence. It is up to THEM to PROVE it, not her.
don't say it couldn't happen because it wasn't too long ago most of us would have never believed the USA would have free speech zones and rendition taxis either.
Why wouldn't they believe that? The USA is just as susceptible to corruption as any other country (provided the people aren't keeping the government in check). Actually, believing that the US government could never become corrupt probably hurt their chances of ever stopping the corruption in the first place.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
It's specifically for this reason that contempt can run longer than the sentence for the crime being charged. If you'd be better off sitting for contempt than the crime, what's the motivation to disclose? Therefore, the punishment for contempt must be more onerous than the punishment for the crime specifically to motivate disclosure.
Virg
There were a few states who believed something along those lines circa 1865. There are arguments on both sides of the issue: The civil war is proof positive that brothers will certainly take up arms against one another if they believe they're fighting for the right cause. It's also strong evidence (as fits with common sense) that a better supplied, commanded, and outfitted army will triumph over smaller forces.
On the other hand, the Revolutionary War is evidence that it's entirely possible for a relatively small band of fighters to make things too expensive and painful for a would-be ruler to remain in control.
All that in just our own short history, which says nothing of results going in either direction throughout world history. As with most conflicts, it generally comes down to who wants it more and is willing to go to the furthest lengths to win, followed by luck and skill of execution in equal parts.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
A better analogy is being compelled to give a DNA sample, which is done all the time.
People who claim that this is a violation of the woman's self-incrimination rights, don't understand self-incrimination rights.
"I'm pretty sure you guys still have a large portion of the 2nd."
Not really. Some small arms, unless they look scary, shoot fast, etc. No machine guns at least not without a license class that is pretty much impossible to get.
"such you can carry don't mean a lot when you're faced with IFVs, main battle tanks and combat aircraft"
IED's and small arms used in an urban guerrilla warfare can mean more than people think. But if the 2nd amendment were in force we could own all of those things you listed as well.
There is more to the 2nd amendment than owning guns though. It also specifies that the people are to organize and maintain disciplined (the word says regulated but that's what regulated meant then not like today where it means controlled by government) militia. The federal government isn't to maintain a standing army but rather assemble the peoples militias into one at time of war (or peace for no more than 2yrs). The only thing the Constitution actually lets the feds maintain is a Navy and they know it, that's why the Navy is the largest branch and contains its own air force (lots of examples), army(marines), special forces(seals), nuclear arms (nuke subs), ballistics (ships and subs armed with large missles), and navy all wrapped into one.
Witness also the trend in "preppers". Though you do have a point, the federal government has been doing all it can do to destroy small-scale food and water production, as have private interests.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A tank is easy to stop with pistols. Just shoot the truckers that transport fuel. A tank without fuel isn't much use. Only a fool would attack the tank itself, which I suppose is why that's the only tactic you thought of.
It depends. If you have reason to believe that you will be arrested and it will be seized as evidence, then "maybe". If you're simply cleaning up your drives, then "probably not". Where of course "you have reason to believe" is really "your lawyer is able to convince a judge that you had reason to believe". As far as I know, spoliation charges are usually only pursued in cases where they could demonstrate that the suspect was blatantly and knowingly destroying evidence.
"It's a common misconception that silencers, real assault rifles (meaning that you can select between semi-auto and full auto and / or burst fire), machine guns, explosives, rocket launchers, etc are illegal in the US."
Yeah. Now try stockpiling them for your well regulated people's militia that can pool money to buy such things. The BATF will stick a very large boot up your ass. Even so, all of those things constitute small arms and 1986 is actually quite a while ago. The pre-1986 part isn't because you are allowed to have them, its because they can't make a law retro-active so no points for upholding the 2nd amendment there btw.
"Oh, as for "No one sane is going to take on anything with a semi-automatic rifle", the majority of the time the military doesn't even flip their rifles"
Agreed. Full auto is highly overrated. Especially on a rebels limited ammo budget.
"Sure, they have tanks and bombers, but unless they REALLY wanted to destroy their own infrastructure and a lot of non-combatants on their own side, they wouldn't use them"
I wouldn't count on that. But I also wouldn't count on a well organized rebellion not having these things. People always discuss this scenario as if every service member would break their oath to uphold the constitution and defend the government rather than the people. Officers would defect and soldiers would as well. Additionally retired officers would resume their rank with the resistance. We are talking about the largest group of people who have taken action to back their conviction to fight for their ideals. I doubt any real revolution would get off the ground without support from former military.
to kill about 5k military, the iraqis insurgents have seen a close to 100k casualties on "their" side (it is more complex, as insurgent probably are responsible for a fair share of the civilian casualties). http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/
Anyway, even factoring in the factor, it is clear that insurgent are sustaining severe casualties to inflict minor damage to the organized military.
If this stands? It hasn't even occurred yet. It's simply conjecture at this point. We have no idea what evidence they have that useful data is contained in the encrypted drive, what evidence they have that the subject does or does not remember the password, or what the judge will do about it.
All they have to say is "We believe this file is encrypted using stenography, give us the password"
In theory. In practice, the judge, prosecutor, and investigator on the case are unlikely to keep their jobs long once the defendant's lawyer plays up the case in the media.
"The defendant has truecrypt in his possession and we believe he has a hidden volume, give us the password'
They'd also need to produce a file that is likely to be a TrueCrypt container -- sufficiently large and high-entropy. Evidence that the TrueCrypt software was also used instead of just installed would help.
He also assumes the military will always be on the side of the government. We have a hard enough time getting people to volunteer to shoot foreigners. Try convincing them to shoot Americans.
Better you delete the files if you cannot remember the passkeys ... wtf have files you can't open?
Then why not everyone else? think "I'm afraid I do not recall..."
People people, corporation people are the cause of the disappearing amendments after all, and corporation people who don't like a law buy a better law. Not an option for most people people.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Judge: give us your password
Me: I forgot
Judge: if you don't give me the password you go to jail for contempt
Me: so if I can't remember my password, I'm going to jail right?
Judge: yes
Me: Ok here it comes, is this being recorded?
Judge: yes you are being recorded
Me: Good. Since I'm going to jail no matter what I do, I just want to say that you can suck my ball sack you wrinkly old power tripping goatfucker. Maybe your dick stopped working because you were jacking off to family circus too much. There, now that is some contempt, take me away officer.
I have to reset my password every time I try to log into my ISP e-mail, because the passphrase is stored in my mail client normally. In theory, I could be using the account every day, and not remember the passphrase. Similarly, I can't remember my netflix passphrase. :(
But that data isn't in her brain, it's on her hard drive. They couldn't care less what her password itself is. They're asking her to produce the contents of the hard drive.
So grossly negligent encryption is a crime?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Because they may have like in my case good data along with the worthless or be like spotting a needle in a needle stack? When WinRAR first started touting their ability to encrypt RAR files I futzed with it, throwing a picture here or doc there and then trying to see if I could break into it with a password cracker. Did i erase every. single. instance? Fuck if I know but since it was something involving software I would have played with it in my software folder which i back up monthly because you never know when some driver or software you downloaded 3 years ago for a client could come in handy and I have a little DB app that lets me find which stack its on quickly since they are all sorted by day/month/year. I have also played around with just about every encryption software that has ever been featured on slashdot or Freeware Arena. Again can i be 100% sure i tossed every single file I futzed with? The answer would be no simply because this kind of crazy bullshit isn't a scenario that a reasonable man could have foretold.
But I think you missed the point friend, even if lets say i did manage to toss every encrypted file since truecrypt makes hidden volumes and there are a couple of copies of truecrypt scattered among the backups that gives them a perfect excuse to simply drop you in a hole and forget about you. "Your honor as you can see he has a copy of truecrypt and this software is known to create hidden volumes therefor we ask you to compel him to provide the password" and since i can't provide the password to a hidden volume i don't have and of course can't prove a hidden volume that is made to be undetectable isn't there tada! Instant disappearing geek.
Now any way you slice it friend that is some truly scary shit, a legal way to throw you in a hole without trial for the rest of your days if the judge feels like it.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
This reminds me of one day, my brother and dad went up to Fort Campbell in Kentucky to play some paintball. The only people playing were them, one 13-year-old walk-on, and a squad of troops. Now, my brother and dad have a lot of experience. So they took the walk-on and let the 8 troops play on the same team.
3 v 8
The 13-year-old was eliminated every match. So were the 8 army guys. Neither my brother nor father was ever hit.
It is hard to express how important experience is. In combat, it's strategy and nerves. I have no doubt that a bunch of 60-year-old vets would wipe the floor with 20-year-old people with less experience. They would have their shit together and would out-think and out-maneuver their opponent.
What does that have to do with forcing someone to give up a password that they claim that they can't remember? In one situation, it's clear that you've committed a crime, in the other, not so much.
assume the worst and penalize you accordingly
A great thing to do for any free country. Just assume they're guilty. Guilty of... using encrypt and then forgetting the password!
Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, right?
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
They're asking her to produce the contents of the hard drive.
They have the contents of the hard drive. They want a transform of the contents of her hard drive based on a function in her brain.
I think this is like having a set of books without names. The prosecution wants the names to make sense of the books, but that's in the defendant's brain. 5th Amendment protects that testimony.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
One of the side issues here is speculation about whether the FBI can't decrypt this hard drive. I suspect they can, and already have.
There is likely content on that hard drive that will likely incriminate this woman (who lives with her mother) and bigger players in the mortgage scam. I don't think the FBI would otherwise care so much about getting at this woman's data.
In order to use that content in court against these other players, the FBI can't so well make a case out of data THEY have decrypted. The defense could claim the evidence is invalidated by the decryption method employed by the FBI. So, it's important to lean on this person to properly decrypt the data so the FBI can use it in other cases.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
They cant! Want to mess with them? Encrypt garbage, like ipsum lorem, or random numbers. Or just create lots if docs and spreadsheets where you randomly pound the keyboard to get v;lknsdvavou c;lkvpoifsavpoihafv o.
Of course, they may not believe you gave them the real password, but then some systems are set up where you only have to log on (with the correct password) to see the contents, and others use the password to encrypt the file, so giving a bad one gives you garbage.
HexaByte - he's a square and a half!
Do NOT underestimate the training hammered into the members of the US military. They are so inculcated with submission to "legitimate civil authority" that they will by and large carry out any orders issued by the emperor^H^H^W president, via the chain of command. Heck, the strategic missile forces have been rigorously trained to carry out orders to blot out an entire foreign nation, even if that were to surely mean destruction of their own nation as a consequence.
And do I have to remind you of May 4, 1970, Kent State? Those weren't even highly trained elite forces. They were just National Guardsmen. And it wasn't just a handful of bullets fired; after a Sergeant opened fire with his .45, 29 of 77 guardsmen fired a total of 67 rounds, killing 4 and wounding 9.
Maybe you think we live in a completely different nation as compared to 1970. I don't think so. Since 9/11, the level of paranoia in our national government, filtering down through the ranks, has surged out of control.
Also understand that the US military is made up of volunteer civilians. Sure, some in the US military will be willing to fire on US citizens, but I seriously doubt that number will be more than half. While I don't expect a lot of grunts shooting their officers, I would expect an awful lot to not return from guard duty.
You left out the fact that it also tipped the scales leading to the complete, irrecoverable ruination of the domestic economy. While I agree it's not clear who if anyone might have "won", it's VERY clear who lost.
Nineteen hijackers and a couple of middle-aged rich kids with daddy issues managed to drag hundreds of thousands of highly-trained military personnel and a couple trillions dollars into a ten-year conflict that killed thousands of people, sent one country back to the stone age, destabilized another, and undermined the basic constitutional underpinnings of the most powerful country on Earth. And it still isn't even clear who "won." I don't think you can predict these sort of things based purely on the number of things or people on each side.
You really think that an organized military and police force can be stopped by citizens (including grandma) with their .38 S&W?
Back during WWII, the US OSS (Office of Strategic Services) had this really cool idea, which was held as classified until the end of the war: they were going to drop hundreds of thousands of these little, very cheaply made .45 caliber single shot pistols (with a handful of shells and an instruction manual), from airplanes into occupied France. The idea is, in part, that partisans would use them to stick up / kill German troops and borrow better weapons.
Problem is, by the time this idea was about to be implemented, the French Resistance already had accomplished this, using revolvers and other small arms which were hidden from confiscation, and they had worked up to stealing heavy machine guns, Panzerfausts and other types of heavy duty stuff. There were a number of drive-by style machine gun assassinations against German officers, and they were becoming such a thorn to the Germans, that French hostages (women and children of course) were rounded up and executed to dissuade the resistance--several times during the war.
Airdropping these pistols wouldn't accomplish much at that time they were completed, so they didn't fly. The point is this: you shouldn't underestimate the difference a simple, low power weapon can make, at the right place and time.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
If the incriminating evidence is on the hard drive, go ahead and use it to incriminate her. If you can't do that without data from her brain, then that data is incriminating. You can't constitutionally compel incriminating testimony.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Come to think of it, so do I. When I was younger, I thought that encryption was important for even slightly sensitive data. My old Win98 machine in the front office probably has a number of files (maybe even a partition) to which I seriously doubt I remember the password. Guess I better not ever get accused of mortgage fraud, or I'm fucked.
When I originally read of this woman's story here, it got me wondering:
If you are arrested for some material crime, is it common practice for the prosecution to force you to explain every key on your keychain, and to unlock the lock it to which it belongs?
What if you have a drawer literally full of old keys? Is the burden of proof on you to prove that the prosecutor's evidence isn't being secured somewhere and hidden by you, facilitated by one of those keys?
I think there's likely a simpler explanation for why this woman is being coerced - there is other hard evidence that she used that laptop and used encryption to secure the evidence that the court seeks. Perhaps a phone conversation, email or confession to that effect?
Still, it does beg the question as to whom is doing the prosecution's job.
That logic may sound invalid, but that's exactly the way contempt of court works -- in civil cases. Interestingly, you actually have more rights in a criminal trial. At least, that's the way my lawyer friend explained the Chadwick case to me.
" Much like how one can be compelled to open a safe."
The difference is that the right amount of C-4 put in the right places will open any safe. Tell the cops to put some C-4 under the hard drive, set it off, and then it would be decrypted without the password you can't remember.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
In theory. In practice, the judge, prosecutor, and investigator on the case are unlikely to keep their jobs long once the defendant's lawyer plays up the case in the media.
Yeah. The H. Beatty Chadwick case was really detrimental to the career of then appeals court judge Samuel Alito.
If your intent in destroying it is preventing it from being used in court against you, it's destruction of evidence.
If you accidentally destroy it, there's no foul. Knowing that the feds might get nasty if they ever wanted a password, and zeroing them specifically to avoid any such nasty encounters, is destruction of evidence.
About the only thing he could legally do is mail the files to the feds, along with a signed statement to the effect that he does not have the password to decrypt their contents. Obviously, this would be pretty stupid, although there is a chance that they'd assume you really do have nothing to hide and leave you alone. And it could come in handy if they ever did grow an interest in your encrypted files - show them that the file hasn't changed and they weren't interested in it then, so why now?
Or, just continue doing what he's doing now - he's withholding evidence, but he's protected because he's not under any legal obligation to testify against himself.
You mean for the corporation people or the people people?
What are you? Some kind of racist?
"We believe this file is encrypted using stenography, give us the password"
My Mom's going to be real surprised when I tell her she was an accomplished cryptographer. Perhaps you meant "steganography"?
Then again, I suppose shorthand does sort of fit into the realm of crypto.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Yes, by having the encrypted drive, the prosecution does technically possess the documents. Of course, they do not possess the documents in any usable form.
The point of discovery is to bring everything, incriminating or not, before the court, after which the prosecution and the defense will offer theories of what happened, supported by the evidence. It's not the actual possession of a physical document that matters. It's whether the information it contains is shown to the court. Refusing to show information to the court, regardless of whether such information is incriminating or not, is itself a criminal act, namely one of not following the legal process. Similarly, resisting arrest is a separate crime, because you're not following due process.
If the documents, instead of being encrypted, were written in some obscure language for which she is the only surviving speaker, would she be obligated to translate them into English so the courts can read them?
You should tell the world's military leaders to should stop training support gunners.
Yes, I understand there's a disconnect between people who are trained to use automatic weapons and those who are not. There's a disconnect between a lot of things that professionals do vs. non-professionals. However, there are still a proportion of the non-professionals who know how to conduct themselves correctly given the conditions and tools they have available.
Having the capability of automatic fire gives you options you may not otherwise have, and the people going off half-cocked are going to waste ammunition and/or get themselves killed anyway.
Protection from self-incrimination exists to prevent cohered confessions and things of that nature. The same principle can't possibly be applied to the hard drive, as the contents of the hard drive came into existence before there was any criminal investigation. The contents of the hard drive are evidence, not testimony.
You are thinking about it from a literal technical perspective that is improperly applied in this context.
I didn't say anything about the appeals judges, only about the judge who makes the contempt-of-court ruling.
Notably, appeals court judges are supposed to only rule on points of law that are appealed. If your appeal is that you cannot be detained indefinitely for contempt of court and the judge's opinion is contrary, you'll continue to be detained whether the judge thinks it's right or not.
The ghost of the Kripo (Kriminalpolizei - the criminal police department) of the Third Reich tells you to be not so sure. Even before they came organizationally under the control of the RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt - the Reich main security office) as a branch alongside the SD and Gestapo - even before that, they had long been urging preventive action (think concentration camp) against the "habitual criminals". The distinction between Gestapo and Kripo was in practice blurred. There was in actuality a shadow chain of command separate from the paper one. Heydrich corrupted the Kripo; drained their scruples by providing increased power and finances.
An internal Gestapo report of 1937 complained "The Gestapo profession is not popular with the man in the street and is frequently the target of direct attacks in the press", but the Kripo had "full understanding and recognition from the public". So the Kripo was subverted. Acting in concert they could get all desired things done.
To answer your objection, of course Jack is not sent on the detail that arrests Jack's mother; he goes on the detail to arrest George's mother, and vice versa.
You also assume that the police will always be on the side of the government. I don't care who pays me, I'm not killing my grandma!
The password is not incriminating testimony. They could keep it completely secret from the court, and the jury, and the prosecution and it would have no bearing on the case. They could lock her in a private room with the computer and she could enter her password with no one looking, and no one else would ever know what it was, and it would have no bearing on the case whatsoever. The data is what is incriminating. That data is evidence, not testimony, and by withholding it she is interfering with a court order that she produce it.
You should tell the world's military leaders to should stop training support gunners.
It depends on the type of battle they anticipate. If I found myself fighting as an "insurgent" I would be happy my opponent was focusing their effort in the wrong areas.
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The subject of the criminal case is mortgage fraud. Thus, keep your torrents and downloads on an encrypted disk drive. And use Linux. And... maybe move to a safer jurisdiction "copyright" wise. So far Russia seems safer, but don't keep your fingers crossed... sad sad sad world.
Vassili Leonov
Protection from self-incrimination exists to prevent cohered confessions and things of that nature.
Partly, but it's a general principle about not being forced to testify against your own self-interest. If it were only about cohered confessions we wouldn't have the spousal testimony privilege, for instance.
The contents of the hard drive are evidence, not testimony.
And they're probably free to try to break the cypher. What they want is data that only ever existed in the RAM of the computer. If they had a warrant they could have intercepted that data. But after the fact, it's like taking phone records and compelling the accused to say what was transmitted over the wires, when that was never recorded nor was there a warrant to do so.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
>They could lock her in a private room with the computer and she could enter her password with no one looking, and no one else would ever know what it was, and it would have no bearing on the case whatsoever.
In that case, the entire contents of the hard drive would be testimony.
The data is what is incriminating. That data is evidence
Right, but it's evidence that the prosecutor doesn't have. The court cannot order a defendent to produce the murder weapon.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Things have gotten pretty shitty in terms of legislation, but I'm still a long way from believing that if asked to, the military would simply comply with an order to assault US civilians.
... and yet, that's pretty much exactly what's going on in Syria today, with Basher el-Asshat's military and police forces pitted against Syrian civilians.
Can't happen here? Think again.
licet differant, aequabitur
Then again, if the military took up arms against even a small subset of the American populace, odds are good that enough of the U.S. wouldn't want to fight that war, either.... Just saying.
There's a fine line between freedom fighter and terrorist insurgent. As far as I can tell, the primary distinguishing factors are whether the person talking about you agrees with you and whether your side won or not. Neither one is a very good thing to be unless there are no other options remaining for securing liberty from your oppressors. Thankfully, at least in the U.S., we're nowhere near that far down the slippery slope in our descent into hegemony yet.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
It's nothing like that. The data still exists on the hard drive. The lady is simply preventing the court from accessing it.
That's absurd. The hard drive is physical evidence.
Sure they can. But if they knew he had it, they'd probably know where it is, so there'd be no need ask him for it. So that's a really bad analogy.
A better analogy would be if the prosecution had a pane of glass with DNA which they suspect belongs to the defendant. If the defendant refused to give out a sample of her blood for comparison, she would be held in contempt. The DNA is not self incriminating. It's only incriminating if it matches the DNA on the glass. It's the same for her password. There's nothing inherently incriminating about it. It's the data on the hard drive that's incriminating.
It is believed (and seen after Katrina) that the police, after TSHTF, will be primarily on the side of the police officer, his family, and his closest friends.
This is not actually bad. If TSHTF and I have to defend myself against three bandidos the last thing I need, after the fact, is a G-man with investigative powers from the government that is no more.
Science fiction books tell us that shortly after the collapse survivors band together into large groups. Police and military officers may be natural leaders of those communities, once people understand what's going on. That is fine too.
That's absurd. The hard drive is physical evidence.
Yes, the hard drive is physical evidence. But you're not looking at the hard drive anymore. You're looking at a transformation of the information on the hard drive based on testimony. That's not physical evidence.
Suppose instead of an encrypted hard drive, we're talking about an old fashioned date book. Defendent has obfuscated the date book by using initials. The court has ordered the defendent to fill in the names behind the initials.
Now the fact is that "JD" refers to "John Doe" isn't incriminating by itself, just like a password. But in combination with the physical evidence, it yields incriminating information, just like a password.
I don't think there's any question that such a court order would be unconstitutional under the 5th amendment. There's no meaningful difference between this and passphrases.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
But if the 2nd amendment were in force we could own all of those things you listed as well.
Before the rebellion it does not matter. After the rebellion starts all the stockpiles of military weapons become your primary area of interest. If you have arms factories on your territory they immediately start producing what you need.
The problem is that the names themselves can be incriminating. And in any case, initials are not names, so you aren't decrypting anything, you are asking them to recall information which is not contained in the date book. That's not a fair comparison.
If on they other hand, the names in the date book were encrypted somehow, and you could prove that, then yes I believe you could compel them to turn over the cypher. Good luck with that though, you can't actually hold someone in contempt indefinitely (I think the record is 14 years) and if they hand coded their date book they were probably covering up some pretty gnarly shit. It's also likely it could be broken in a reasonable time frame, so they would simply continue the trial once they could decode it.
Good luck with that though, you can't actually hold someone in contempt indefinitely (I think the record is 14 years)
That's a long time to spend in jail for exercising your 5th amendment rights.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
... or some other system that has plausible deniability built in. You give them the fake password, it decrypts, the information is useless, and you are scott free.
The supreme court has held that "a person can invoke his Fifth Amendment rights against the production of documents only where the very act of producing the documents is incriminating in itself." So they seem to agree with me that you do not have a right under the fifth amendment to withhold documents from the court.
And the brain doesn't really delete anything either. Usually, the memory is still there, you just can't access it.
"doesn't really delete anything" and "usually" kind of contradict each other.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
Glove Defense would actually be very practical here. As in "If the password don't fit, then you must acquit!"
Not surprising. The Supreme Court has trashed every other protection in the Constitution in recent years. This doesn't make the act any more constitutional, but it does make our government less legitimate.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I did some searches and didn't turn anything up, so if you could maybe check your history I would appreciate it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Oh, as for "No one sane is going to take on anything with a semi-automatic rifle", the majority of the time the military doesn't even flip their rifles (well, usually carbines to be exact) to burst fire / full auto because it's very hard to control and you burn through your ammo a lot faster without being more effective.
Hell, the US Army is seriously considering removing full-auto from the standard weapons provided to infantry--something about panic and burning through ammo-and going to a new M-1 variant that only offers single- and burst- fire.
Sure, they have tanks and bombers, but unless they REALLY wanted to destroy their own infrastructure and a lot of non-combatants on their own side, they wouldn't use them (because even if they won, the country would be totally FUBAR'd for decades).
Well, before all the /. pansies come out of the woodwork with 10 million bogus reasons why in some kind of hypothetical break down between government an civilians the civilians could never ever prevail over the military, let me just say a few words: Egypt, Libya, Syria. (Romania, Poland, Afghanistan in the 80s...)
Sigh, "M-16 variant", not "M-1 variant". I hate this laptop keyboard.
Instant get-out-of-jail-free card. Priests don't have to testify. Become ordained by the universal unitarians or something.
You see THIS is why we geeks are royally fucked if this is allowed to stand. because i don't know a geek that hasn't played with crypto at one time if for no other reason plain old curiosity and who knows if we tossed every single file we futzed with? the whole point of me buying 3tb worth of HDDs was so that i could futz around all i wanted and not worry about space, who knows what kind of files i have scattered here or there that I haven't messed with in ages. I also have about every crypto tool and security ISO backed up on DVD because it was touted someplace and I wanted to give it a spin and so it ended up in my software folder which gets backed up monthly.
In a way this is like attacking a zebra because it has stripes, after all part of what makes us geeks over jocks or normals is our love of trying new software and playing with the more esoteric stuff like crypto simply so we can learn or just see how something works. I personally had a period where i played with password crackers for awhile and so i have no doubt there are probably a dozen or so encrypted files where i didn't bother even attempting to remember the password because its whole point was just a target for the cracker.
So tell me orgelspieler , how would we ever get free if some three letter kicked down our door and demanded the password? If you can't say I forgot then frankly anybody could be sent to prison forever or trivially railroaded. To me this is a classic case of guilty until proven innocent with the added twist that if you have honestly forgotten you will be getting life in prison. Truly scary orgelspieler , truly scary.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
http://www.gunreports.com/news/news/US-named-most-heavily-armed-country_3666-1.html?ET=gunreports:e1156:193407a:&st=email
There's a link to download a PDF from the researchers. The big takeaway is "U.S. citizens own 270 million of the world’s 875 million known firearms, according to the Small Arms Survey 2007 by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies. About 4.5 million of the 8 million new guns manufactured worldwide each year are purchased in the United States, it said."
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Isn't the point with hidden volumes to have two of them?
One with data that is not incriminating and one with?
And neither should "fit" exactly into the empty part of the enclosing hard disk.
If pressed you can provide the position information and pass phrase for one of them. Can they prove that another exists?
Maybe you have dozens of small encrypted volumes. Again only one of which has the data the court wants to look at. But can they tell when and where that one is or that you have given them ALL of the pass phrases and positions for ALL of the encrypted volumes. A multi-terabyte drive can contain a large number of randomly placed gigabyte volumes.
Your cellphone is a dead give away where you were and what time you were there, and how much time you spend at a given place
Well, maybe it is a dead giveaway in what general part of the city you were in.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
You really think that an organized military and police force can be stopped by citizens (including grandma) with their .38 S&W?
French Resistance did quite a bit of covert work against the SS with single shot Liberator pistols.
Where do you get the idea that the armies will face each other on a mountain-top like in The Patriot? To control an area, you need boots on the ground. Those boots are on the feet of men who are extremely vulnerable to bullets.
A military unit from elsewhere won't know the terrain like locals. Locals will know good places to hide and operate from. Locals will already know good places to set up ambushes. People fighting for their homes, families and neighbors will be a lot more invested than someone fighting for a paycheck.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I'm already in their databases. I've been visited by the BATF. I haven't broken any laws. I'm not worried.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Guns and cars, I wonder what else we have all of, besides collectible happy meal toys.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The could still compel you to decrypt the hard drive, without divulging the password.
"Deleting" is a deliberate act. The brain doesn't actively delete anything, it just fades away if you don't access it for a long time. So the memory is usually still there, although not always, since it may have faded away.
what if the documents were in a foreign language. would it be the responsibility of the witness to translate for the court? what if the witness had forgotten (or never knew) how to read the foreign language?
substitute cipher for language. it makes no difference.
Funny how you just said the exact same thing.
If the brain doesn't delete anything, then the memory isn't "usually" there, its always there, just hard to access. But then you admit not always, that sometimes it can truly fade away, so that then means it CAN be deleted. Unless you're making some awkward distinction between "actively delete" and "fade away", which seems rather arbitrary. I think you put too much meaning in the word "delete".
For the purposes of this case, either a memory can be gone forever, or it can't. Unless you can prove or link to proof that we either can or cannot lose a memory forever, you haven't added anything worthwhile.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
Civilian casualties are irrelevant to the question of who won the war. Only a muddle-headed liberal thinker who doesn't understand that war is first and foremost about meeting a military objective, not a body count, would confuse the two. The insurgents succeeded in creating such a bad situation that the American people no longer supported it and wanted to pull out. Mission achieved, body account to achieve it irrelevant. To both sides, and that's what you miss, civilian casualties are just collateral damage.
You and I may not support such a pointless conflict on the grounds that the objective is not worth the cost in human life, but that doesn't mean anything from a cold analysis of whose goals prevailed.
When she gets to jail, they can Waterboard her until her memory improves. It's the American way.
If someone came and confiscated my computer, by the time I got to trial (many months, years even), what are the odds I would remember that password? I travel abroad, and my laptop is encrypted with TrueCrypt. I change the pass weekly. If you grabbed my comp today, in a month I would have trouble remembering which password was in use at that time. In a year, no hope that I would remember it. I might, after a few hours of guessing and sparking memory get in... but if there is incriminating evidence on there... I would have even greater difficulty remembering.
Let's also not forget that some of those military people are actually going to uphold their oaths to support and defend the Constitution. Whole battalions could swing one way or the other depending on how their commanders see the situation. I sure hope it never comes to that.
In Reason We Trust
You say you support the right to bear arms, yet you suggest that civilians do not need military style weapons. This betrays a misunderstanding of the purpose of the second amendment. Unfortunately this is entirely too common, its probably not even your fault and I'm glad you are asking this question. I hope that I can answer it adequately.
Let's start with the text of the second amendment shall we? It is:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The amendment consists of two parts, the introduction which states the reasoning for the amendment and the actual right to be protected. "To keep and bear arms" is relatively straight forward, it means people have the right to own and carry weapons. Note that it doesn't say "The people shall have the right to keep and bear arms." That would imply the government is granting the right to the people. Rather it says "shall not be infringed," implying that the right to arms is a preexisting right that no government can legitimately take away.
That aside, typically people get hung up on the "well regulated militia" part. They argue that this means the army should have the right to arms, but not the people. The amendment clearly states that it is the people whom have the right to keep and bear arms though and the SCOTUS acknowledged this in DC vs Heller and again in Chicago vs McDonald. The second argument that is typically made is that the word "regulated" implies that the government has the right to restrict how people may exercise their second amendment right. However, there is two problems with this argument. The fist is that this statement takes place in the introduction of the amendment. The legal aspects of the second amendment can be completely understood by everything after the comma. "The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." That's all we need, but the framers decided to include the WHY not just the WHAT.
The second problem is that "regulated" doesn't mean the same thing today as it did in 1787 when the Constitution was adopted. In that time, "well regulated" in regards to a militia or a military unit would have meant "properly disciplined." It also helps to remember the context. The revolutionaries had just fought a war against a regular army, the most powerful army in the world at the time, with "untrained civilians." They had no idea what would happen with the new government they were creating, but they knew that most often governments used their armies against the people. Ensuring that the people were able to keep and train in the use of arms was another check on the power of the government. Consider Jefferson:
And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
Which brings us to the conclusion of the matter. The purpose of the second amendment is not to protect the rights of hunters, target shooters, or the right to self-defense. It is to protect the people from the government. Consider Madison:
Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.
So if the purpose of the second amendment is to defend the people from the government, and the government controls the military, then m
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08fZQWjDVKE
more download links
http://donttalktocops.com/
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Forgetting a password isn't a crime - yet...
If you have sensitive data, you absolutely, positively, MUST protect it with the best encryption available.
The government will eventually demand the keys to all our locks, as in this case, but we don't have to give them to them.
If you're serious about truly secure passwords, use a process and a manager that will delete passwords automatically after a certain period of time. That way, nobody has the password, and demanding it from you becomes an absurdity.
I empathize with the bullies and the torturers that would prefer to have the ability to easily break all our locks, I just have no intention of colluding with them.
Not much point in holding someone in jail for years for "contempt of court", or in even bothering with utilizing "enhanced interrogation" techniques on people if they don't have, and never did have the passwords to begin with.
I call Bullshit.
The over-reaction to the incident is what did far, far more damage.
And what the hell do you mean it's nto clear who "won" ?
Clearly the terrorists "Won", they changed our way of life. Or do you have "patriot amnesia" too ?
Insightful to a topic of forgetting a password? Come again? How about offtopic?
If it's an adequately strong password/key phrase, by my organisation's password criteria, there's a good chance after two years it'd blur into all the other slightly different passwords you use. Did it have a capital letter there? Was that punctuation mark a ? or a ! Which numbers did I use for that? She probably got into trouble by using the word 'may' - "my client may have forgotten" - it sounds like you're trying it on. if you said "my client has forgotten" that would be more believable.
The brain doesn't delete memories to make room. There doesn't seem to be any practical limitations on the brain's capacity. To the contrary, knowing a lot of things seems to make it easier to remember new things.
If memories actually disappear, it's because they fade away from not being used for a long time, not because the brain makes an effort to delete them.
You're nit-picking semantics to a point I didn't even try to make.
Also, just because knowing more memories increases the ability to remember does not imply that the brain never actively forgets something it finds unnecessary. You're making a leap. It can still remove a few unused ones while overall increasing in total number. I don't think you have any science to back this up, just your gut feeling. If you've got sources, I'd be interested.
Not to mention that the password could have never been recorded in long-term memory, and she just remembered it for a few days at a time as a combination of short-term and muscle memory.
Not to mention a million other things. Again, you're nit-picking something none of us were arguing.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
I guess you reject my idea that the brain prioritizes memories, but that is absolutely true. Anything the brain thinks it has ready access to it won't memorize. Sometimes when I drive to work I get there and have no memory of the drive in between. I stopped at all the lights and I was paying attention, but i've driven the route so many times over and over my brain has decided that future memories of the same thing aren't vital. Similarly, things that are written down nearby and you know you can get access to at any time, your brain is much less likely to memorize.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
I call Bullshit. The over-reaction to the incident is what did far, far more damage. And what the hell do you mean it's nto clear who "won" ? Clearly the terrorists "Won", they changed our way of life. Or do you have "patriot amnesia" too ?
Slashdot is probably not the best place to re-litigate 9/11, but I feel compelled to point out two things; 1) Yes, the over-reaction did do a lot of damage, but it was still an over-reaction to the actions of less than two dozen people and 2) I don't know what patriot amnesia is, but saying that the terrorists "won" because they changed our way of life is a bit americocentric. I would argue that the day-to-day life of ordinary Iraqis has changed much more dramatically. If it has improved, then maybe the terrorists won--I don't really know what Bin Laden's goals were, outside of the flinsy pretext of getting US military bases out of Yemen and Saudi Arabia--or maybe the Coalition of the Willing Won (was their goal to help Iraqis, again I don't know...) If their university system is any indication, then things have gotten worse. 9/11 has not had quite the same impact here in Europe as it has in the US, but the impact is still negative. So if life for Americans, Europeans, Afghans, and Iraqis is worse, then no-one "won." But the fact that so many people are now stake holders is illustrative of the original point; you really can't use numbers of things or people to predict the outcome or magnitude of a conflict.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
Aha, but there's a difference between failing to commit things to memory, and forgetting them. It's like the difference between a degrading VHS tape and not pressing the "Record" button at all.
Once something is committed to memory, the only way to forget it is to refrain from retrieving it for such a long time that it fades away. You (or your brain) can't do anything to forget it faster.
I'm not saying you're wrong, just clarifying my point, in case there's any misunderstanding.
Also, just because knowing more memories increases the ability to remember does not imply that the brain never actively forgets something it finds unnecessary.
It means it's unnecessary for the brain to delete memories, though. It's unlikely the brain would make an effort to delete something if there's no practical limit to the number of things you can keep in your memory.
I don't think you have any science to back this up, just your gut feeling. If you've got sources, I'd be interested.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-is-the-memory-capacity
Your assumption that those that disagree with you are "untrained" or otherwise unknowledgeable is the first fatal flaw in your position.
Find me someone who is familiar with automatic weapons in military capacity who claims there is zero practical use for them in insurgent combat, then get back to me. I never claimed a specific combat capacity they were useful in, only that A) firearms are useful in insurgent combat, B) it is possible to modify semi-autos, and C) that autos do actually have practical use. Anything past that is an unfounded assumption which exceeds what I actually said. Unless you disagree with the specific points in A, B, or C, we're done here. If you're going to disagree with C, it'd better include refutation of the entirety of the benefits of auto use throughout military history.