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."

Comments

What kind of encryption did the FBI break?

[samriel]

Reading that made me ask three questions:
1) What kind of encryption did the FBI break?
2) Can they do it again, for any arbitrary encrypted data?
3) If 2), what kind of decryption should we use instead of 1) ?

Re:What kind of encryption did the FBI break?

[FatLittleMonkey]

and to understand that the important part of the document is the "6712 folders" and seven hundred thousand plus images they contain.

Seven hundred thousand files. But you genuinely heard it in your head as "images", right? And that is why prosecutors play such word games with, what should be, mundane technical information, because it does the same thing with the judge and jury.

"707,307 files" becomes "700,000 images" becomes "700,000 porn images, much of it kiddy porn."

Re:What kind of encryption did the FBI break?

[dj245]

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.

Regardless of the circumstances, ordering someone to decrypt a hard drive should be against the 5th amendment. I look at this the same way as any other "evidence is in a very hard place to get" situation.

If I lock evidence in a locker or a house, the authorities are going to break my lock or break down the door. They can't order me to give them the key if the location of the key is unknown to them. If I have an electronic keypad, they can't order me to give them the passcode.

If I kill someone and, having decided that a "shallow grave" is likely going to get me caught, bury the body in a 1000ft grave (suppose I own a drilling company), they can't make me dig up that body. It is upon them to dig it up. If I weigh someone down and dump them in the ocean, they can't force me to tell them the exact latitude/longitude. They can gather evidence all day long through any legal means, but forcing someone to actively incriminate themselves has never been, and should not be, legal in the US.

The fact that we now have locks that are effectively unpickable and unbreakable is unfortunate for law enforcement, but that doesn't change the 5th amendment. There should be no exceptions. The nature of the crime or the amount of other evidence doesn't matter to the 5th amendment.

"constitutes" child pornography.

[Anonymous Coward]

Weasel-wording it like that makes me think it's probably random manga pictures from his browser cache and not real child pornography.