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Judge Orders Child Porn Suspect To Decrypt His Hard Drives
An anonymous reader writes "After having first decided against forcing a suspect to decrypt a number of hard drives that were believed to be his and to contain child pornography, a U.S. judge has changed his mind and has now ordered the suspect to provide law enforcement agents heading the investigation with a decrypted version of the contents of his encrypted data storage system, or the passwords needed to decrypt forensic copies of those storage devices. Jeffrey Feldman, a software developer at Rockwell Automation, has still not been charged with any crime, and the prosecution initially couldn't prove conclusively that the encrypted hard drives contained child pornography or were actually Feldman's, which led U.S. Magistrate Judge William Callahan to decide that forcing him to decrypt them would violate his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. But new evidence has made the judge reverse his first decision (PDF): the FBI has continued to try to crack the encryption on the discs, and has recently managed to decrypt and access one of the suspect's hard drives... The storage device was found to contain 'an intricate electronic folder structure comprised of approximately 6,712 folders and subfolders,' approximately 707,307 files (among them numerous files which constitute child pornography), detailed personal financial records and documents belonging to the suspect, as well as dozens of his personal photographs."
The Judge never said the FBI couldn't have a go at it, just that the suspect couldn't be compelled to hand over the decryption information because of lack of evidence.
Once the FBI had some success of their own and found evidence, then the judge changed his mind.
Pedophiles are animals, and don't deserve rights.
You are an idiot, and I doubt if you even understand what pedophilia is. Most pedophiles are not child molesters. Most child molesters are not pedophiles. Pedophilia is a psychological condition that causes someone to be sexually attracted to prepubescent children. But most people that feel this attraction do not act on it (since to do so is a serious crime). Most people charged as child molesters, on the other hand, are not pedophiles. They are not attracted to prepubescent children. Instead they are attracted to teenagers that are legally children, but biologically most certainly are not.
But the defendant in this case has not been accused of either pedophilia (which is not a crime) nor child molestation. He has been accused of possessing child pornography, which is a crime even if no actual children are involved. Computer generated animation, or even a pencil sketch can get you arrested. You want to castrate people for drawing pictures?
From what I'm reading, if the judge doesn't believe him, he'd just find him in contempt of court and detain him until he remembers.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/02/what_happens_wh.html
No. Besides, she looks like she's 17, not 7.
But child pornography, in most instances is not depicting sex with children, but sex with underage minors, for instance, a 17 year old, or someone who looks like they are 17.
Yes, people who want to have sex with children is wrong, but the law is expanded far beyond this and people get crazy with the CP label because the law is far too wide. Just like peeing in your back yard can get you slapped with a "sexual offender" label for life, so can publicizing photos of your 25 year old girlfriend who looks 17 get you labeled as a CP distributor.
This is why I don't jump off the deep end and call this guy a monster. For all we know the CP he enjoys looking at is 20 year old women that look young. I sure wouldn't fault him for that. If it is photos of kids, then I agree, he is one sick bastard. But we don't know that, because the law is too broad, so why assume? it just gets you worked up. If you were a juror, that is exactly what they would be going for, too.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
All of this information is in the initial filing, which wired posted here, including the fact that the government figured out partial patterns to his passwords. You should read the filing, though I warn you, you will want to retch by the end of it:
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2013/04/fedswantdecryption.pdf
After reading the request, I am amazed that the judge issued the first ruling at all. The download logs clearly showed entries that graphically describe pedophilia being written to a secure disk. I think the agents freaked out a bit, and assumed the disks would self destruct (as far as I know, the maxtor disks don't in fact do so).
I know it's unpopular to say on slashdot, but the government has a job to do, and is doing it well.