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Canada's Police Chiefs Want New Law To Compel People To Reveal Passwords (www.cbc.ca)
Reader DaveyJJ writes: CBC is reporting that the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, has passed a resolution calling for a legal measure to unlock digital evidence, saying criminals increasingly use encryption to hide illicit activities. The chiefs are recommending new legislation that would force people to hand over their electronic passwords with a judge's consent. RCMP Assistant Commissioner Joe Oliver is using the usual scare tactics "child-molesters and mobsters live in the 'dark web'" in his statement today to drum up public support in his poorly rationalized privacy-stripping recommendation. A few years ago, Canada's Supreme Court ruled that police must have a judge's order to request subscriber and customer information from ISPs, banks and others who have online data about Canadians. I guess that ruling isn't sitting too well with law enforcement and Canada's domestic spy agencies.
Poor memory is no excuse for breaking the law.
Yet insanity is.
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Instead of "criminals increasingly use encryption to hide illicit activities", we have "government officials increasingly use secrecy classifications to hide illicit activities". Let's have a law that says if governments want to be able to force people to give up passwords then governments can't delay or deny open records requests. Any effort by government officials to hide information should be punished at a personal level exactly the same as how they want to punish citizens for denying their passwords.
What law did he break? The law of not writing his password down? How often have you used a password recovery system because you couldn't remember what passphrase you used with a webpage you used a decade ago and now wanted to reuse only to find out that your email address is already "in use" because you apparently have used it before?
Now imagine you have some ancient data rotting away somewhere on a server which is "obviously" encrypted (read: They can't find a program to read it with so it has to be). Now provide the password for it, you child molesting terrorist!
Good luck.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.