A lot of places do this (though often access to the data is delayed so that the group can get publications out of it first). However, often research groups find that they can get access to a lot of data from another organization -- data that improves the accuracy of their work and would otherwise be prohibitively expensive to gather. These other organizations then place restrictions on that data, so the research group can't release it. So they're stuck with a decision between getting better results or being able to release all of their data. The former is the right choice.
Keep in mind most of their targets are large organizations with tons of Internet-connected computers -- one of those machines is bound to have a vulnerability.
X-ray backscatter has a better resolution and sensitivity to density differences, but almost no capacity to see past higher-density objects, like millimeter-wave does.
Incidentally, "tuned" in this case is probably that X-ray backscatter uses lower-energy (higher-wavelength) X-rays than typical transmission X-ray applications.
It's not that the X-ray backscatter machines "might" be safe. Unless they're lying about the dosage (which would be stupid), the risk to the traveler from the radiation is trivial. There's as much cancer risk from the formaldehyde in the air from furniture and from countless other sources, all of which are small compared to the radiation received from living near rocks and underneath the sun.
I'm fairly certain that if you used an electronic device to identify a police officer based on their facial appearance or iris scan, you wouldn't be accused of wiretapping. I won't claim that you won't be accused of *anything*, but certainly not wiretapping.
You're thinking of engineering or applied science at best. You won't know the benefits of fundamental research until later. You know, little things like electricity and semiconductors.
That's not actually true of particle physics, but even if it was, you'd be wrong. The essence of the thing is not just its constituent parts. You can't look at an ingot of steel and say that it's a sword until it's been shaped. Likewise, you can have a bunch of energy, but it's not a Xi_b until you make it one.
A string of numbers is never random in and of itself -- it's the method by which they are generated that is random or not. The sequence "9 9 9" is random if and only if it happens to be the output of a random function.
What you perhaps mean is that any string of numbers could have been the output of a random function. That's not strictly true, but it's close enough. You certainly can't tell just by looking at the string of numbers whether it's really the output of a random function -- though you can often make a good guess.
It is, but it's low compared to the frequency that qualifies as "often" for CFLs. They don't work so well if the light switches on and off every 5 minutes all day, every day.
It's only vapor at low pressure when it's in the bulb. It condenses when the bulb breaks. Elemental mercury in any form isn't particularly well-absorbed by the body, though. Realistically, 4 mg of elemental mercury poses no significant danger to people. Unfortunately, policymakers insist on using the most cautious possible language, so they tell you to clean or get rid of anything that can absorb mercury (like fibers).
It's the same as buying batteries, meat, carrots, and bricks. There are a lot of parameters that you can understand if you want to. You can ignore that and buy from reputable companies. You can ignore it and buy whatever is cheapest, in which case you'll get a cheap product.
Number of on-off cycles is only a problem if you have a much higher cycle rate than you see in home use. A bathroom is well within on-off cycle limits. Humidity is usually the problem there; it's not good for the electronics in the ballast.
Funnily enough, setting efficiency standards for lightbulbs (which most incandescents made at the time the law was passed did not meet) is exactly what the law did. Calling it a ban on incandescents is propagandizing. (Most incandescent manufacturers now have bulbs that meet the efficiency standards.)
Clearly, one of the arguments on the side of "you have to disclose your password" is that there isn't a fundamental difference.
I would argue that there are certainly a lot of interesting differences. However, I think the simple legal arguments, at least, are fairly convincing. A password is a security mechanism for information. It's very similar to a safe combination, in that a safe is a place that you can hold your possessions and papers and the combination is the access mechanism; likewise, a hard disk is a place for possessions that are digital data and a password is an access mechanism. I don't think it's very much at all like testifying against oneself. The main thing they have in common is that it's verbally-communicated information (although that aspect isn't fundamental to a password -- it could be a keyfile, biometric quality, or sequence of actions), but that's the same as providing instructions for accessing a safe or other storage location -- which you can be required to do.
Your and the jury's faith that the entire system hasn't been tampered with, essentially.
There are protections so that individual people -- particularly people who have something of a vested interest in "winning" the case against you -- can't effectively tamper with evidence. But if you claim that a whole chain of people are corrrupt, at some point, you have to say, why not claim the whole thing has been corrupted? Why bother tampering with evidence? Might as well have a bought judge and a fake jury -- how are you as a prisoner going to tell the difference? Then you don't even need to monkey with the evidence.
The non-conspiracy answer is that they require extensive logging and verification by third parties. In short, you need to be able to go from the "original evidence" (your encrypted hard drive, verified to be unchanged by a hash comparison) to the evidence used against you through a sequence of documented actions that can be shown to not introduce false evidence. (Usually the real path to verification is shorter, since they vet whole procedures and individuals, and turning the trial into a "proper procedure" investigation bores the jury to death unless you happen to be right.)
That depends a lot on how good your lawyer is and what other evidence there is against you. If there's no evidence against you and you refuse to testify against yourself, what it looks like is that the police are harassing you or are trying to find a scapegoat.
For one, every hurdle you add makes it less likely that someone will bother making that effort. For example, if you already secure your data, it's already reasonably dangerous to simply memorize the one password and not have a backup password that reveals "safe" information. It's only because we have laws against beating the password out of you that this case even exists. (In reality, if your encryption needs are so great, you should take into consideration the possibility of enemies beating it out of you.)
For another, a system such as that you suggest (like a TrueCrypt container-within-a-container) isn't as powerful as you might think. It may be effective in some cases where people are just casually inspecting a drive and the presence of encryption throws a red flag. But usually they try to decrypt a drive because they have a reasonable idea of what's on the drive and a reasonable idea of the situation in which the data was used. (For example: this is where you store the data on your plans to blow up a building that you've been working on for the past two weeks.) Then, lots of little things that forensics can turn up can trip you up. For example, your outer porn collection probably doesn't have a pattern of timestamps that suggest you really use the drive at all -- but it *does* happen to have a large, contiguous section of free space, as if it contained a TrueCrypt container-within-a-container.
Legally, they can require you to provide the combination for a safe. In practice, this isn't often an issue. Since they can break the safe anyway, it's fairly easy to get you to cooperate. If it's obvious you won't cooperate, they just break the safe.
I'd be willing to bet that the supreme court hasn't actually ruled on this issue definitively. Maybe they've ruled on a similar issue, yes. But I'd be willing to bet that Department of Justice hires law clerks who are able to come up with obviously-relevant case law.
A high concentration of adrenaline is 1 ppm. :-)
A lot of places do this (though often access to the data is delayed so that the group can get publications out of it first). However, often research groups find that they can get access to a lot of data from another organization -- data that improves the accuracy of their work and would otherwise be prohibitively expensive to gather. These other organizations then place restrictions on that data, so the research group can't release it. So they're stuck with a decision between getting better results or being able to release all of their data. The former is the right choice.
Keep in mind most of their targets are large organizations with tons of Internet-connected computers -- one of those machines is bound to have a vulnerability.
X-ray backscatter has a better resolution and sensitivity to density differences, but almost no capacity to see past higher-density objects, like millimeter-wave does.
Incidentally, "tuned" in this case is probably that X-ray backscatter uses lower-energy (higher-wavelength) X-rays than typical transmission X-ray applications.
It's not that the X-ray backscatter machines "might" be safe. Unless they're lying about the dosage (which would be stupid), the risk to the traveler from the radiation is trivial. There's as much cancer risk from the formaldehyde in the air from furniture and from countless other sources, all of which are small compared to the radiation received from living near rocks and underneath the sun.
Surely with that confidence you can point to a court ruling where photography (not video) was determined to be wiretapping.
I'm fairly certain that if you used an electronic device to identify a police officer based on their facial appearance or iris scan, you wouldn't be accused of wiretapping. I won't claim that you won't be accused of *anything*, but certainly not wiretapping.
You're thinking of engineering or applied science at best. You won't know the benefits of fundamental research until later. You know, little things like electricity and semiconductors.
That's not actually true of particle physics, but even if it was, you'd be wrong. The essence of the thing is not just its constituent parts. You can't look at an ingot of steel and say that it's a sword until it's been shaped. Likewise, you can have a bunch of energy, but it's not a Xi_b until you make it one.
A string of numbers is never random in and of itself -- it's the method by which they are generated that is random or not. The sequence "9 9 9" is random if and only if it happens to be the output of a random function.
What you perhaps mean is that any string of numbers could have been the output of a random function. That's not strictly true, but it's close enough. You certainly can't tell just by looking at the string of numbers whether it's really the output of a random function -- though you can often make a good guess.
It is, but it's low compared to the frequency that qualifies as "often" for CFLs. They don't work so well if the light switches on and off every 5 minutes all day, every day.
It's only vapor at low pressure when it's in the bulb. It condenses when the bulb breaks. Elemental mercury in any form isn't particularly well-absorbed by the body, though. Realistically, 4 mg of elemental mercury poses no significant danger to people. Unfortunately, policymakers insist on using the most cautious possible language, so they tell you to clean or get rid of anything that can absorb mercury (like fibers).
Same reason you should shop around for batteries, hammers, and meat.
Is that EPA limit for methyl mercury or elemental? Perhaps you could indicate your source.
It's the same as buying batteries, meat, carrots, and bricks. There are a lot of parameters that you can understand if you want to. You can ignore that and buy from reputable companies. You can ignore it and buy whatever is cheapest, in which case you'll get a cheap product.
Number of on-off cycles is only a problem if you have a much higher cycle rate than you see in home use. A bathroom is well within on-off cycle limits. Humidity is usually the problem there; it's not good for the electronics in the ballast.
Not only is it not a ban, it doesn't go into effect until 2012 and doesn't reach full force until 2020.
Funnily enough, setting efficiency standards for lightbulbs (which most incandescents made at the time the law was passed did not meet) is exactly what the law did. Calling it a ban on incandescents is propagandizing. (Most incandescent manufacturers now have bulbs that meet the efficiency standards.)
Clearly, one of the arguments on the side of "you have to disclose your password" is that there isn't a fundamental difference.
I would argue that there are certainly a lot of interesting differences. However, I think the simple legal arguments, at least, are fairly convincing. A password is a security mechanism for information. It's very similar to a safe combination, in that a safe is a place that you can hold your possessions and papers and the combination is the access mechanism; likewise, a hard disk is a place for possessions that are digital data and a password is an access mechanism. I don't think it's very much at all like testifying against oneself. The main thing they have in common is that it's verbally-communicated information (although that aspect isn't fundamental to a password -- it could be a keyfile, biometric quality, or sequence of actions), but that's the same as providing instructions for accessing a safe or other storage location -- which you can be required to do.
Your and the jury's faith that the entire system hasn't been tampered with, essentially.
There are protections so that individual people -- particularly people who have something of a vested interest in "winning" the case against you -- can't effectively tamper with evidence. But if you claim that a whole chain of people are corrrupt, at some point, you have to say, why not claim the whole thing has been corrupted? Why bother tampering with evidence? Might as well have a bought judge and a fake jury -- how are you as a prisoner going to tell the difference? Then you don't even need to monkey with the evidence.
The non-conspiracy answer is that they require extensive logging and verification by third parties. In short, you need to be able to go from the "original evidence" (your encrypted hard drive, verified to be unchanged by a hash comparison) to the evidence used against you through a sequence of documented actions that can be shown to not introduce false evidence. (Usually the real path to verification is shorter, since they vet whole procedures and individuals, and turning the trial into a "proper procedure" investigation bores the jury to death unless you happen to be right.)
That depends a lot on how good your lawyer is and what other evidence there is against you. If there's no evidence against you and you refuse to testify against yourself, what it looks like is that the police are harassing you or are trying to find a scapegoat.
For one, every hurdle you add makes it less likely that someone will bother making that effort. For example, if you already secure your data, it's already reasonably dangerous to simply memorize the one password and not have a backup password that reveals "safe" information. It's only because we have laws against beating the password out of you that this case even exists. (In reality, if your encryption needs are so great, you should take into consideration the possibility of enemies beating it out of you.)
For another, a system such as that you suggest (like a TrueCrypt container-within-a-container) isn't as powerful as you might think. It may be effective in some cases where people are just casually inspecting a drive and the presence of encryption throws a red flag. But usually they try to decrypt a drive because they have a reasonable idea of what's on the drive and a reasonable idea of the situation in which the data was used. (For example: this is where you store the data on your plans to blow up a building that you've been working on for the past two weeks.) Then, lots of little things that forensics can turn up can trip you up. For example, your outer porn collection probably doesn't have a pattern of timestamps that suggest you really use the drive at all -- but it *does* happen to have a large, contiguous section of free space, as if it contained a TrueCrypt container-within-a-container.
In reality, what they usually do is find the Post-it note that you wrote your password down on.
Legally, they can require you to provide the combination for a safe. In practice, this isn't often an issue. Since they can break the safe anyway, it's fairly easy to get you to cooperate. If it's obvious you won't cooperate, they just break the safe.
I'd be willing to bet that the supreme court hasn't actually ruled on this issue definitively. Maybe they've ruled on a similar issue, yes. But I'd be willing to bet that Department of Justice hires law clerks who are able to come up with obviously-relevant case law.