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UK Computing Student Jailed After Failing To Hand Over Crypto Keys
stephendavion sends news that Christopher Wilson, a 22-year-old computer science student, has been sent to jail for six months for refusing to hand over his computer encryption passwords. Wilson has been accused of "phoning in a fake warning of an impending cyber attack against Northumbria Police that was convincing enough for the force to temporarily suspend its site as a precaution once a small attack started." He's also accused of trolling on Facebook.
Wilson only came to the attention of police in October 2012 after he allegedly emailed warnings about an online threat against one of the staff at Newcastle University. ... The threatening emails came from computer servers linked to Wilson. Police obtained a warrant on this basis and raided his home in Washington, where they seized various items of computer equipment. ... Investigators wanted to examine his encrypted computer but the passwords supplied by Wilson turned out to be incorrect. None of the 50 passwords he provided worked. Frustration with his lack of co-operation prompted police to obtained a order from a judge compelling him to turn over the correct passphrase last year. A judge ordered him to turn over these passwords on the grounds of national security but Wilson still failed to comply, earning him six months behind bars.
Everything about this is a fiasco.
"He's also accused of trolling on Facebook."
If that doesn't spell out terrorist, I don't know what does.
The passwords worked, they were just case sensitive and the police didn't realize they had Caps Lock on.
There is no "5th Amendment" in the UK.
Under similar UK laws, forgetting is a crime. For example in the UK if you get caught speeding by a speed camera, you have 30 days to tell the police who it was who was driving. Except there is no statute of limitations and speeding tickets can come through your door months after the event, though there is the frequently cited 2 week rule (Scotland has a statute of limitations). So if you genuinely forget then the registered keeper of the vehicle is usually given double the punishment of the speeding offence and sometimes the penalty for the speeding offence ontop. So a 3 points £100 fine becomes 9 points + £300 fine £90 tax (yes there is a tax on crime in the UK)
This is England. Being taller than a police officer is a crime there.
Seems the founders of computing as we know it have lost their way.
People have argued the right to not incriminate themselves right up to the European courts, but it was rejected. When you are arrested in the UK you are told that if you fail to mention when questioned anything you later rely on in court it may harm your defence, so there is no right to silence either.
What isn't clear from the story is if this guy just forgot his password or if he refused to hand it over. The law says that the police must prove you knew the password, e.g. by showing that you used it very recently.
Either way, it's a fucked up law that needs to be repealed.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
That's why you need two factor authentication. A password and a keyfile stored on floppy disk. Ideally an old floppy disk with multiple read errors. If you are arrested you can say that the police must have damaged the disk.
Alternatively TrueCrypt's plausible deniability works well.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong.
Leaving aside that this is UK news and the UK doesn't have the 5th Amendment, protection from being forced to testify against yourself is not based on this ideology you assume it is where your memory would be protected. You misunderstand the entire reason for the right. The reason for the right is because of the long history of forced confessions. History teaches that when the police interrogate them long enough and hard enough they can get them to "confess" to almost anything; even heinous crimes carrying the death penalty. This can be achieved without traditional torture, with just hard questioning and lack of sleep. Because of the physical power the police hold over a person who has been arrested, this is a pervasive problem in places without these protections, including historical England.
But the 5th Amendment doesn't protect physical facts, and it doesn't protect your memory; it protects you from testifying about your memory. If your memory could be read by doctors using a harmless mind-reading machine, that would be allowed, because it would be physical evidence, not testimony that might have been compelled.
Another problem with compelled testimony is where they attempt to accuse a person of lying in their claim of innocence, even before it is established that they are guilty. Prosecutors are very good at that; finding some innocent detail you remember wrong, or perceived differently than witnesses, and then using that to "prove" you're lying. And your denial contains lies, that is almost the same as a confession in the hands of a skilled prosecutor.
Another example of what can be compelled is the location of a key to safe, or the combination to a safe; assuming the police have a warrant, no physical evidence is protected by the 5th Amendment, including things like the location of a key. The safe is physical evidence, not testimony. And the location of the key is an objective physical fact that is not prone to the type of abuse that a compelled confession is.
And you would send a judge to freakin' prison over your lack of understanding of the very rights you claim to value, yet somehow know nothing about. You even then somehow manage to work in a false accusation of terrorism. There is nothing basic about your ass-hattery; you're a first class champion ass-hat!
As bad as the US is getting, I sure AM glad I don't live in the UK with THIS crap going on...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
http://xkcd.com/538/
Brings new meaning to "brute force" hacking. Or is that whacking?
Life is not for the lazy.
Yeah, I always wanted to do a UK trip, but their crazy laws have always kept me away. Not even because I'm worried that I'll get caught up in them, so much as I look down on them as a people for institutiting them in the first place.
And no, the irony isn't lost on me that many do not want to visit America for the same reasons. I probably wouldn't either, if I weren't a native.
[boot up in single user mode so syslog and ntpd are not running]
# date 0417212012
# su - victim
$
[pigs copy incriminating files at will using cp without -p]
[could change the date numerous times for different files]
Yeah, that's REAL hard. They just planted files with an mtime, ctime, and atime of 2012.
How can timestamps be "out of sync with the rest of the system"? Every file in the system has different timestamps as it is.
The problem with demanding the key and jailing him for not doing so is that they haven't (as far as I know) proven he actually remembers the key at all. Have they done anything to prove that he didn't genuinely believe the passwords he told them would decrypt the data? People do forget things all the time, even very important things. Throw in some duress and mental anguish over being jailed plus autism and it's a wonder if he gets his middle name right.
The fundamental problem with any penalty for not testifying is that it hinges on punishing someone for a crime you can never actually prove them guilty of. That might actually be good reason to punish a judge, or at least remove them from the bench. Not being punished unless proven guilty is a fundamental right that goes well beyong the Constitution or any particular foundational document.
To be fair, in the US they'd have just charged you with a bunch of more serious crimes as well, which they'd offer to drop if you plead guilty for the one they wanted you for.
I know what you want to say, and it is largely correct, but I won't let that get in the way of pedantry. The UK does have a constitution, which is often referred to as "unwritten". This is a bit of a misnomer, as most of the constitutional provisions in the UK are written down somewhere. For instance, most of what would be the equivalent of the US Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure are contained in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. The UK constitution is not codified, and there are no framework constitutional principles (well maybe Parliamentary Sovereignty ), but it does exist. There are rules and processes that govern what become laws. It's more that Parliament can decide to remove any rights by repealing any enabling legislation, PACE, HRA, whatever. In the US, rights are supposedly natural, and cannot easily be taken away by government. Certainly, in the UK Parliament has not granted the citizenry any general protection from self incrimination. While there are laws against torture and other practices that could lead to malignant self incrimination, even the police caution when being interviewed reminds you that "You do not have to answer any questions, but it may harm your defense if you do not now mention something which you later rely on in court." So you definitely do not enjoy the same broad protections from self incrimination in the UK as you do in the US.
It seems you can be compelled to reveal your passwords in the US if they're looking for evidence they already know to exist rather than information they may not know about.
I stole this Sig
"Tyrant judge"?! He was applying the law. A bad law in the opinion of many people, sure, but nonetheless crystal clear in its scope and effect. Are you saying the judge should have not applied the law? That he should have ignored the statute and made up his own rules? You're in favor of "activist judges"?
A judge should be free to question a law, yes.
Judges in Australia have come out of court saying the law was wrong. I believe Judges in the US are allowed to do the same if it contravenes your constitution (same here, we have a constitution too you know).
A judiciary that blindly follows the letter of the law is pointless as they just become to tools of politicians who often write bad and lopsided laws (hence making an independent judiciary pointedness). Nice try to poison the well with that "activist judge" quip, but it didn't work.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.