ACKyushu clues us to recent news out of the UK, where two people have been successfully prosecuted for refusing to provide authorities with their encryption keys, resulting in landmark convictions that may have carried jail sentences of up to five years. There is uncertainty in that the names of the people convicted were not released; and without those names, the Crown Prosecution Service said it was unable to track down details of the cases. "Failure to comply with a section 49 notice carries a sentence of up to two years jail plus fines. Failure to comply during a national security investigation carries up to five years jail. ... Of the 15 individuals served, 11 did not comply with the notices. Of the 11, seven were charged and two convicted. Sir Christopher [Rose, the government's Chief Surveillance Commissioner] did not report whether prosecutions failed or are pending against the five charged but not convicted in the period covered by his report."
An analysis of Section 3 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 is a piece of UK law that, among a range of other things, contains a section that is meant to require the surrender of cryptographic keys to certain authorised parties (which are in effect instruments of the government). If such a request is made as part of an investigation, then the party who disclosed the key is not allowed to tell anyone that the authorities have that key or they face up to two years in prison. Equally, if the party fails to disclose the key, they also face up to two years in prison.
If you are part of a terrorist cell (or a criminal gang) and the police obtain your encryption keys, telling the rest of your cell or gang will enable them to destroy their own compromised data before PC Plod arrives. That is the logic behind the law.
The alternative is to lock up everybody who has supplied keys until any legal case is over, so they cannot communicate the news. This would be worse.
Law is simply unable to keep up with the development of mass communications and freely distributable digital data. It's a simple as that. The options are to do a 16th century Japan and ban progress, or accept there will be problems en route.
Where the definition of 'terrorist cell' is up to the authorities, and in this case means 'animal rights activist'. It could mean anything according to this corrupt, overbearing government.
Where the definition of 'terrorist cell' is up to the authorities, and in this case means 'animal rights activist'. It could mean anything according to this corrupt, overbearing government.
Some animal rights activists do use terror tactics, including bombing campaigns [latimes.com], so in this case it might not just mean 'animal rights activist', it could mean everything you normally mean by 'terrorist'. Yes, there are huge problems with the law, but its being used against animal rights campaigners is not de facto one of them.
"Seven animal rights activists who tried to close down Huntingdon Life Sciences by blackmailing companies linked to the animal testing laboratory were jailed today for between four and 11 years.... a six-year campaign involving hoax bombs and falsified allegations of child abuse" "The activists plotted their campaign from their headquarters, a country cottage near Hook, in Hampshire. From the building -- which police had bugged -- they used encrypted emails, spreadsheets and coded messages to organise the blackmail of the companies and individuals." "While rarely causing physical harm, these offenders thrived on the fear they created through threats and intimidation."
by Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday August 12, @08:34AM (#29037235)
My wife's boss had death threats and faeces shoved in his mailbox by these terrorists because his company does IT work for the London office of a large Japanese conglomerate with a partly owned subsidiary that was once a supplier (not of animals) to Huntingdon Life Sciences. They use exactly the same twisted mentality as Al Qaeda to justify their attacks on the most vaguely related of targets.
No. Nor is there any evidence that they weren't, because the government is keeping everything secret. That is a problem, I agree. But you seemed to be suggesting they were animal rights activists rather than terrorists, and that this was a case of terrorist legislation being used on non-terrorists, which happens, but not necessarily in this case. The union of the sets "Animal rights activist" and "Terrorist" is not empty.
If it was animal rights activits, they should have just eaten hamburgers infront of them. That will get the password out quick... Then again, that might also count as torture. "burger-boarding"
You might be interested in the "Animal Enterprise Terorism Act" (AETA), a new US law which specifically targets animal rights activists. It basically defines activities that most would consider protected speech as terrorism, and punishable with long jail sentences - specifically if those activities are connected with animal rights activism. For example, activists in the US are currently being tried under AETA for holding (admittedly loud and obnoxious) rallies outside upscale fur stores and the homes of high-profile vivisectionists while wearing masks. No weapons, nobody harmed, nothing even broken, and yet everyone expects they will be convicted of what amounts to domestic terrorism. They may already have been, I haven't followed it closely.
The lesson here is that just like with child pornography, governments start out using unpopular groups to introduce new repressive methods. If we don't speak up in their defense now, even if we don't care about the groups being targeted, we'll almost assuredly be next ourselves.
I have been around, I can tell, a lot longer than you have. I've been in countries with overbearing, corrupt Governments. Item 1, you have no idea what you are talking about. When you've failed to bribe a Mexican official or got involved with Spanish Mafia house building scams supported by corrupt local officials, or fallen foul of a South American or Russian "businessman" then you can post about it. Until then, don't exaggerate.
Item 2, terrorism is defined in UK law, and judges have to abide by that law. The definition is not "up to the authorities". It is made by Parliament. If you don't like the definition, write to your MP, join a political party or a pressure group (there are lots) and do something, don't just whine. And if you are a 16 year old posting from your bedroom, William Hague was addressing a Party conference at 16, and I was visiting Parliament several times a year at the same age. You have no excuses. We have senior MPs who get it - David Davis, Chris Huhne.
Item 3.Others have made the point that the UK has had animal rights activists every bit as bonkers and dangerous as US anti-abortion or anti-gun-control activists. But the point also needs to be made that law must be general and not have exceptions. Exceptions make bad law. If we start deciding who is or who is not a terrorist based on anything other than their actions and intentions, this is very dangerous for civil liberties.
Although I think this is an unfortunate law, it is difficult to see how it could be any different. What is your proposal to prevent organised crime using encrypted media to conceal their activities? Unless you can point to a workable alternative solution, you are just ranting.
Item 2, terrorism is defined in UK law, and judges have to abide by that law. The definition is not "up to the authorities". It is made by Parliament.
Instead of pontificating, why don't you just actually read the law [opsi.gov.uk]. There is a disclosure requirement if:
(a) in the interests of national security;
(b) for the purpose of preventing or detecting crime; or
(c) in the interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom.
Those provisions are so vague that police can require you to disclose encryption keys for anything at any time.
What is your proposal to prevent organised crime using encrypted media to conceal their activities? Unless you can point to a workable alternative solution, you are just ranting.
The purpose of this law is not to prevent covert communications because that is impossible in principle.
The purpose of this law it's to give the UK government additional means to force people to obey the government even in areas where the government otherwise has no cause or legal means of forcing you. It's a totalitarian law forced through parliament under the pretext of crime and terrorism prevention.
its the vile bullshit he was spewing that the authorities objected to
If the authorities get to decide that what you are saying is "vile bullshit" and punish you for saying it then free speech is worthless and we might as well abandon it.
The is so wrong. The logic of the law is that you are now legally liable for your memory. Can't remember something 5 years in prison, it is by far the most offensive legislation there is, hmm, what next death penalty for amnesiacs.
I have forgotten lots of passwords, I have had to rebuild data, redo secure OS installs, drop web accounts, have passwords reset and what some fucked up government and corrupt court decide that they want that information, my total by now 5 years at a time would be up around 250 years in jail. The law is bullshit, there is a profound difference between telling a lie and withholding the truth, conscious effort is required to tell the lie but withholding the truth simply requires a lapse of memory. How many people, failed to get every answer right in every test and exam they have taken, billions of people, it is the norm and in by far the majority of instances, they had been provided all the information required to get 100 percent on those tests and exams.
Now lets start holding politicians to the same standard, zero forgetfulness, zero lapses of memory, zero forgotten promises, 5 years jail for every offences, oh yeah, because it does affect national security.
They can claim that any bunch of random data on your disk is actually hiding something encrypted
This may be technically true, and the poor, random, but arrested sod may get away with the usual blank stares. Anyone using TC, Vsoft, or any of the full disk encryption software on the other hand, will have a hard time convincing me or anybody that the random stuff on your drive is not actually data if the boot loader pops up. As for me, the wall in my study room also happens to be, ehm, decorated with some certificates for IT courses, photos and old entrance tickets from LAN parties etc. and I have books about technical/programming stuff lying around. How are you EVER going to convince anybody that you don't know how that 'random data' ended up on your hard drive?
Unless full disk encryption is enabled by default in future operating systems, blank stares or denying the obvious are not going to get us out of trouble.
If you are part of a terrorist cell (or a criminal gang) and the police obtain your encryption keys, telling the rest of your cell or gang will enable them to destroy their own compromised data before PC Plod arrives. That is the logic behind the law.
Umm, that's not logic. That's anti-logic.
Logic would be the realization that a terrorist or organized criminal break laws by definition. Did the people who wrote this honestly think that a terrorist would say "oh, no - our plot to murder thousands of innocent people has been discovered - I'd tell my co-conspirators, but there's that pesky law preventing me!"?!?!
I'd be curious to learn how many of the four who did comply were subsequently convicted of the crimes for which they were being investigated, and what sentences these convictions entailed. I'm also very curious about what prevented the conviction of the other non-compliant nine. Essentially: was it worth it?
While I can see the arguments for and against permitting Section 49 sanctions, I want to know what the practical upshot is. Hypothetically, it may be worthwhile to a potential criminal to serve up to a couple of years in prison with a note on their record akin to "refused to assist in investigation" rather than face the potentially much more damaging convictions that their cooperation might incur.
My concern is that the law will be amended to reflect this, leading to much harsher sentencing in order to prevent this kind of cost-benefit decision being made by suspected criminals.
I'd be curious to learn how many of the four who did comply were subsequently convicted of the crimes for which they were being investigated
Bear in mind that the State can force Alice to hand over keys in relation to an investigation on Bob, so it's not even a case of prosecuting the guilty, just the forgetful.
Any safe can be broken into, especially if its the police doing it, because no ones going to arrest them half way through the attempt. So key or no key, there getting what they want, though they may have something of a dim view of you come sentancing if you didn't give them the key and whatever illegal activity was in the safe. If there was nothing in said safe, and the key really had been lost, the police more or less wasted there time and your not guilty of anything, after all they never found that key either.
However, with encryption it could well take the span of several peoples life times to crack a key needed to unlock the data, hence the law brought in. However if you have genuinely lost the key, or its destroyed, and you have nothing illegal encrypted, say bank details and the like, your going to prison anyway.
The police don't know what evidence is there with certainty until they can access it. If they are given the power to break open a physical lock because they have satisfied a judge (or any other requirement) that they are likely to discover evidence by doing so, that's one thing. However, they can get to that evidence with or without your help.
If they believe that decrypting a drive or file will provide evidence and they can get to that evidence without your help fine. If they can only get to the evidence with your help then they have no evidence. And this law is basically saying that with no evidence they can send you to jail.. because you won't help them prosecute you. Which is kind of contrary to the whole concept of legal trials: how can it be mandatory for you to do the work of the prosecution when you are the defendant?
Elsewhere in the discussion others mention the right to remain silent, and when you ask "isn't this more like police demanding you unlock a door? You can't hide evidence behind a physical lock, so why should a digital lock be different?" then there are a whole bunch of slippery slope questions. Isn't this like the police demanding you tell them where you were at the time of the crime? You can't stop them finding out (but they may never unless you tell them). Who were your accessories? You can't prevent forensics from determining that so you should have to tell them!
But really, let's simplify it:
"You can't hide evidence behind a physical lock, so why should a digital lock be different?"
Because it is different? You can hide evidence behind a digital lock, and you do have the right to remain silent. Sometimes. Apparently.
BTW I am from the UK and I grow more ashamed of the people who govern it almost every day.
"You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence."
The reason for the change is that the "right to silence" has gone: if you don't immediately tell the police your defence when you are arrested, the court may ignore anything you say in your trial, and convict you anyway.
The right to silence remains. You do not have to answer any questions. The only thing that changed is that they can now say that you did not answer the questions. Prior to the change in the law the police were not allowed to say that you had not answered their questions and that meant that they could not say that they had asked because it is hard to say that something was asked without saying that there was not an answer. This was obviously a stupid situation and was rectified. If you chose not to answer the police can now tell the court that they asked you and you refused to answer, and that can harm your defence (as you are warned).
One decrypts the files or filesystem while the other key overwrites the contents with random data.
I would also like to know how the authorities could possibly tell a properly encrypted file from one that only contains random data and consequently how they could prove that a filesystem is, in fact, encrypted.
I think you're approaching this from the wrong angle.
The issue is no longer whether you can prove their is nothing incriminating in the "ecrypted file" but whether the old memory you've had for 7 months is an encrypted file or not.
Further, TrueCrypt is well known. "Hey, do you have a second 'hidden' partition on this slightly incriminating but pretty inoccuous drive?" "No." "I don't believe you. Do not collect £200."
This is a very, very bad day for the British public.
I've been thinking about that for awhile. You don't want a system that will destroy the encrypted data - as others have pointed out, the cops will image your drive before they do anything, so it's sort of pointless. But I think you could do even better with a set of one time pads. I'm envisioning a system that works like this:
You have data you want to encrypt of a certain size. Doesn't matter how large, but you can't really add to it after it's encrypted.
You generate a key the size of your original data and xor the key with the data you want to encrypt. If your key is random enough it should be impossible to decrypt. They say you can get something truly random with atomic decay or cosmic background radiation. These days storage is cheap, so having a key as big as a couple gigs should be no big deal - keep it on a fob.
Now here's the twist. After you've encrypted your data you generate a second "key" by xor-ing the encrypted data with something innocuous. War and Peace, maybe, or cat pictures from the internet. Now you have a key you can give to the cops if they ever come calling, and the data they come up with will be recognizable as data of some sort. So it will be difficult for them to argue you haven't provided "the key".
That's assuming that the police are drooling morons that have no clue what they're doing.
Obviously they'll copy the drive before trying anything on it. You hand over the "wrong" key, data gets scrambled, the restore it from the copy they took and asks for the correct key.
This sounds like a good application for a TPM, don't you think? Isn't that supposed to stop anyone being able to remove data from the machine? (Unless the TPM is backdoored...)
Do modern TPMs have a "suicide" feature that allows them to destroy the secret and create a new one on operating system request? If not, they should have.
Carefully crack a CD in various places, so that not data can be recovered from it, scrawl on it "Encrytion Keys - Keep Safe" and hide in a stack of CDs.
When arrested, tell them about this CD that has your keys. When they come back and inform you its damaged go psycho screaming at them for having lost your keys, and hence, years of data (cos your back ups are encrypted too right?).
No cute little work-around is going to help, because the RIP act was designed as a tool of authoritarianism. Recently in historical terms, encryption has became essentially unbreakable [wikipedia.org], and this is the backdoor to it all.
So? Don't use an empty CD but one with the actual keys. Flip a bit somewhere in the keys.
If they try to decrypt your drive with the key and fail, blame the recovery process.
I think they'd have a pretty hard time proving that the recovery of the keys from the damaged CD was 100% correct. They might get so far as to make it probable, but I know if no way to prove it 100% accurate without the original data to verify it with.
Hmmm, maybe I shouldn't have posted this... if they find this message and link it to an IP I frequently use.../me engages in paranoid episode.
by Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday August 12, @04:54AM (#29035285)
A hundred years ago today, if someone had a giant safe in their house, and they were suspected of any crime whatsoever, the legal authorities (of pretty much every country in the world, it would baffle me to hear about somewhere this would not be the case) would simply ask for the keys. If the person refused to hand them over, the person gets punished. The "punishment" can be of different forms - whether prison in itself, or just a lot more unfavourable treatment from a judge and the assumption of guilt going against you, but nothing at all? Never. The difference with encryption keys is not all that great.
I think they are two different things. A safe is a physical object that holds, well physical objects. Not the same as encrypting data which is really just making information indecipherable. One hundred years ago today analogy would be closer to having a journal that the government wants to read but you wrote it in code.
Suppose I have TrueCrypt installed on my machine, but I don't have anything encrypted. What stops to police from accusing me of having encrypted files and demanding a key? How do I prove random bits of data on my HD are random bits of data and not super secret encrypted files? I doubt I even need Truecrypt installed for the police to use this to get a guaranteed 2 or 5 year conviction.
To clarify, proving that a section of random bits of data on my hard drive is NOT an encrypted file is equivalent to proving that I am NOT a witch.
This could be easily abused by the police. All they have to do is find a section of random data on a hard drive. Then, the police ask you for a key. When you don't provide one ( because there is no key ), you get convicted on "Refusing To Decrypt Data" charges.
It isn't possible to say with certainty what is random data and what is encrypted data.
It's an appalling piece of legislation for a number of reasons:
1. It makes forgetting your decryption key/passphrase/whatever illegal. Yes, seriously. The burden of proof is on the accused to show that they can no longer decrypt the data - how the hell do you prove you don't have something?
2. The people who it was originally intended to inconvenience - the real terrorists, if you like - aren't going to be even remotely concerned by it. They know full well that there is a risk they'll be caught and spend time in jail. If it's a choice between "reveal the decryption key, thus providing the police with the only evidence they're likely to find which implicates you and a number of others for so many criminal activities you'll be in prison for 20 years and when you get out you'll get a bullet in the head for the people who you dropped in it" or "keep your mouth shut, go to prison for two years", I wonder which one they'll chose?
In the U.S., people generally cannot be required to provide encryption keys under the 5th Amendment. However, there are exceptions. There was the recent case of one man who was searched by Customs (or DHS, or whoever) at an airport. One of the agents discovered child pornography in an encrypted portion of the disk that had been (temporarily) opened for access.
Somehow, by the time authorities took possession of the computer, the encrypted drive was no longer opened. The last court decision about that case I am aware of states that a subpoena for the encryption key can be enforced, because the government was already aware of the existence of illegal material, and where it was. All they needed was a "key". This is vastly different from demanding a key first, so they can poke around in your private material.
As an analogy, imagine a shed in your yard that you keep locked. Law enforcement would, under almost all circumstances, require probable cause or a warrant based on probable cause in order to go onto your property and search that shed. However, if they already knew, with little doubt, that there was illegal material in that very shed, then they have the legal justification for a warrant, or a subpoena of whatever information is necessary to open the shed.
The solution to this and other similar "bad law" problems is making them big and visible to the common population.
1 - Get a worm that allows to save data on infected computers. 2 - Get an encrypting program that supports plausible deniability. 3 - Infect self with worm. 4 - Install encrypting program in all infected machines. 5 - Accuse random people of having criminal data in their computers. (e.g.: "I was playing a WoW game and this guy told me he had several thousand [criminal data]").
I'm stunned, I don't know why, to see people debating this as if this is the first time the issue has crossed their consciousness. News flash: this has been in the public water supply for at least two decades now. It's important, and if you haven't given it some thought long ago, you're not taking life seriously, you're just a woodpusher in the game theory of human realpolitik.
It boils down to a very simple premise: that entropy is a munition.
If you have some large chunk (say 100MB) of random bits in a file on your computer, there is no way to prove that there isn't some password that will decrypt this block of bits into meaningful information. Any chunk of information content which looks like pure entropy can be accused of harboring munitions, if you're trying to hit the preservation of society nerve, or child pornography, if you're trying to hit the righteousness of the flesh nerve (we all care about flesh). Steganography is the art of boiling a thin soup: very small amount of pure entropy hidden in a huge amount of tedious backdrop (say 200GB of licit pink matter).
If you have a large quantity of real physical entropy, there is of course no way to produce a password, and neither is there any way to prove that the entropy is real.
The authorities find this unbearable, so we are now deep into guilt by association. Caught hanging out with random bits, go directly to jail.
Any public discussion of the matter would conclude that our social concept of judicial fairness is incompatible with this new guilt by association model. What kind of society would declare entropy a munition? How would we all go about scrubbing anything that looks like entropy from our electronic records? It's not clear it is possible to comply with the implications of this, even if greater society drank the Orwellian Spook-Aid.
Hence the secrecy. If the spooks destroy 1000 innocent lives in the course of protecting society as we know it, it appears to be a cost we're going to have to bear.
The easy way to cease to think seriously about this is to invoke Stalinist escalation: that 1000 lives is soon 30 million lives.
Don't be so hasty. Sun Tsu beheaded one giggling princess to make every other princess march with the discipline of soldiers. For his needs, one was enough.
The credit industry doesn't work on principles much better than our agents of darkness. The suits have succeeded in labeling credential fraud as identity theft. Note the slight shift in blame here: it's not the design of VISA at fault (which could hardly be worse), it's your fault for offering up your digits in the first place (well, you can't use your VISA card without doing so, but why niggle?)
I hand pieces of information about myself to thousands of institutions. If the information is gathered and used against me, somehow I'm to blame, not the thousands of institutions who regard protecting the sensitive information they demanded from me as a cost center to be outsourced to India.
The great line in Brazil is "Confess quickly, or you'll jeopardize your credit rating."
Our credit system is nearly as arbitrary and secretive as this business of guilt by entropy. Innocent before proven guilty. The credit system is exempt from our normal social protections against slander. Any merchant can file a damaging untruth about me with little basis in fact, few avenues of complaint, and no ultimate liability whatsoever. The rating agencies will then spread this slander around and I can't prosecute them for spreading damaging falsehoods about me, even if I finally prove that the original merchant lied, and no sensible agency would persist in believing the original claim.
If we're not up in arms about the violation of our social norms concerning slander implicit to the credit industry, I don't harbour much hope that cottage outrage in this forum over incrimination by entropy is going to make any dent in the real world.
Stay tuned for the next exciting chapter, where encryption keys are extracte
British Police: "Tell us your password."
Me: "For the 100th time, fuck you, I will not tell you my password ever."
British Police: "Oh, you want to be cheeky? Tell us your password or you're going to prison!"
Me: "For the 100th time, fuck you, I will not tell you my password ever."
British Police: "This is a matter of bloody national security, you'll get 5 years!"
Me: "For the 100th time, fuck you, I will not tell you my password ever."
British Police: "He refuses to submit, send him to jail!"
Me: "Great, I'll see you in court. You recorded that conversation, right?"
British Police: ???
Self-incrimination becoming mandatory (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Self-incrimination becoming mandatory (Score:5, Interesting)
so no public accountability yet again by our government.
http://www.ckwop.me.uk/Articles/article01.html [ckwop.me.uk]
An analysis of Section 3 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 is a piece of UK law that, among a range of other things, contains a section that is meant to require the surrender of cryptographic keys to certain authorised parties (which are in effect instruments of the government). If such a request is made as part of an investigation, then the party who disclosed the key is not allowed to tell anyone that the authorities have that key or they face up to two years in prison. Equally, if the party fails to disclose the key, they also face up to two years in prison.
Parent
The logic is obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
The alternative is to lock up everybody who has supplied keys until any legal case is over, so they cannot communicate the news. This would be worse.
Law is simply unable to keep up with the development of mass communications and freely distributable digital data. It's a simple as that. The options are to do a 16th century Japan and ban progress, or accept there will be problems en route.
Parent
Re:The logic is obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:The logic is obvious (Score:5, Informative)
Where the definition of 'terrorist cell' is up to the authorities, and in this case means 'animal rights activist'. It could mean anything according to this corrupt, overbearing government.
Some animal rights activists do use terror tactics, including bombing campaigns [latimes.com], so in this case it might not just mean 'animal rights activist', it could mean everything you normally mean by 'terrorist'. Yes, there are huge problems with the law, but its being used against animal rights campaigners is not de facto one of them.
Parent
Re:The logic is obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:The logic is obvious (Score:4, Informative)
Actually the UK has a problem with extremist animal rights activists who do go round bombing things. Some of these are now behind bars and rightly so.
Parent
Re:The logic is obvious (Score:5, Informative)
"Seven animal rights activists who tried to close down Huntingdon Life Sciences by blackmailing companies linked to the animal testing laboratory were jailed today for between four and 11 years. ... a six-year campaign involving hoax bombs and falsified allegations of child abuse"
"The activists plotted their campaign from their headquarters, a country cottage near Hook, in Hampshire. From the building -- which police had bugged -- they used encrypted emails, spreadsheets and coded messages to organise the blackmail of the companies and individuals."
"While rarely causing physical harm, these offenders thrived on the fear they created through threats and intimidation."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jan/21/huntingdon-animal-rights [guardian.co.uk]
Parent
Re:The logic is obvious (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:The logic is obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:The logic is obvious (Score:5, Funny)
There is actually a series problem with animal rights extremists in the UK.
Perhaps they should be tried in parallel? It would certainly speed up the process.
Parent
Re:The logic is obvious (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:The logic is obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
The lesson here is that just like with child pornography, governments start out using unpopular groups to introduce new repressive methods. If we don't speak up in their defense now, even if we don't care about the groups being targeted, we'll almost assuredly be next ourselves.
Parent
A few points perhaps need making (Score:5, Insightful)
Item 2, terrorism is defined in UK law, and judges have to abide by that law. The definition is not "up to the authorities". It is made by Parliament. If you don't like the definition, write to your MP, join a political party or a pressure group (there are lots) and do something, don't just whine. And if you are a 16 year old posting from your bedroom, William Hague was addressing a Party conference at 16, and I was visiting Parliament several times a year at the same age. You have no excuses. We have senior MPs who get it - David Davis, Chris Huhne.
Item 3.Others have made the point that the UK has had animal rights activists every bit as bonkers and dangerous as US anti-abortion or anti-gun-control activists. But the point also needs to be made that law must be general and not have exceptions. Exceptions make bad law. If we start deciding who is or who is not a terrorist based on anything other than their actions and intentions, this is very dangerous for civil liberties.
Although I think this is an unfortunate law, it is difficult to see how it could be any different. What is your proposal to prevent organised crime using encrypted media to conceal their activities? Unless you can point to a workable alternative solution, you are just ranting.
Parent
RTFL (read the fscking law) (Score:5, Insightful)
Item 2, terrorism is defined in UK law, and judges have to abide by that law. The definition is not "up to the authorities". It is made by Parliament.
Instead of pontificating, why don't you just actually read the law [opsi.gov.uk]. There is a disclosure requirement if:
Those provisions are so vague that police can require you to disclose encryption keys for anything at any time.
What is your proposal to prevent organised crime using encrypted media to conceal their activities? Unless you can point to a workable alternative solution, you are just ranting.
The purpose of this law is not to prevent covert communications because that is impossible in principle.
The purpose of this law it's to give the UK government additional means to force people to obey the government even in areas where the government otherwise has no cause or legal means of forcing you. It's a totalitarian law forced through parliament under the pretext of crime and terrorism prevention.
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Re:The logic is obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
its the vile bullshit he was spewing that the authorities objected to
If the authorities get to decide that what you are saying is "vile bullshit" and punish you for saying it then free speech is worthless and we might as well abandon it.
Parent
Re:The logic is obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
The is so wrong. The logic of the law is that you are now legally liable for your memory. Can't remember something 5 years in prison, it is by far the most offensive legislation there is, hmm, what next death penalty for amnesiacs.
I have forgotten lots of passwords, I have had to rebuild data, redo secure OS installs, drop web accounts, have passwords reset and what some fucked up government and corrupt court decide that they want that information, my total by now 5 years at a time would be up around 250 years in jail. The law is bullshit, there is a profound difference between telling a lie and withholding the truth, conscious effort is required to tell the lie but withholding the truth simply requires a lapse of memory. How many people, failed to get every answer right in every test and exam they have taken, billions of people, it is the norm and in by far the majority of instances, they had been provided all the information required to get 100 percent on those tests and exams.
Now lets start holding politicians to the same standard, zero forgetfulness, zero lapses of memory, zero forgotten promises, 5 years jail for every offences, oh yeah, because it does affect national security.
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Re:The logic is obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
They can claim that any bunch of random data on your disk is actually hiding something encrypted
This may be technically true, and the poor, random, but arrested sod may get away with the usual blank stares. Anyone using TC, Vsoft, or any of the full disk encryption software on the other hand, will have a hard time convincing me or anybody that the random stuff on your drive is not actually data if the boot loader pops up.
As for me, the wall in my study room also happens to be, ehm, decorated with some certificates for IT courses, photos and old entrance tickets from LAN parties etc. and I have books about technical/programming stuff lying around. How are you EVER going to convince anybody that you don't know how that 'random data' ended up on your hard drive?
Unless full disk encryption is enabled by default in future operating systems, blank stares or denying the obvious are not going to get us out of trouble.
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Re:The logic is obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are part of a terrorist cell (or a criminal gang) and the police obtain your encryption keys, telling the rest of your cell or gang will enable them to destroy their own compromised data before PC Plod arrives. That is the logic behind the law.
Umm, that's not logic. That's anti-logic.
Logic would be the realization that a terrorist or organized criminal break laws by definition. Did the people who wrote this honestly think that a terrorist would say "oh, no - our plot to murder thousands of innocent people has been discovered - I'd tell my co-conspirators, but there's that pesky law preventing me!"?!?!
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Re:Self-incrimination becoming mandatory (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides, we all know that the new system is heavily based on proving innocence. Innocent until speculated guilty, and all that.
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Re:Self-incrimination becoming mandatory (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd be curious to learn how many of the four who did comply were subsequently convicted of the crimes for which they were being investigated, and what sentences these convictions entailed. I'm also very curious about what prevented the conviction of the other non-compliant nine. Essentially: was it worth it?
While I can see the arguments for and against permitting Section 49 sanctions, I want to know what the practical upshot is. Hypothetically, it may be worthwhile to a potential criminal to serve up to a couple of years in prison with a note on their record akin to "refused to assist in investigation" rather than face the potentially much more damaging convictions that their cooperation might incur.
My concern is that the law will be amended to reflect this, leading to much harsher sentencing in order to prevent this kind of cost-benefit decision being made by suspected criminals.
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Re:Self-incrimination becoming mandatory (Score:5, Insightful)
Bear in mind that the State can force Alice to hand over keys in relation to an investigation on Bob, so it's not even a case of prosecuting the guilty, just the forgetful.
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Re:Self-incrimination becoming mandatory (Score:4, Informative)
There is not a death sentence in the UK...
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Re:Self-incrimination becoming mandatory (Score:4, Informative)
This means, you can be forced to do self-incrimination. What's next? Do we remove the right to remain silent? In dubio contra reo?
This is the UK. They already have removed the right to remain silent [urban75.org] in the Justice and Public Order Act 1994.
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Re:Self-incrimination becoming mandatory (Score:5, Insightful)
Any safe can be broken into, especially if its the police doing it, because no ones going to arrest them half way through the attempt. So key or no key, there getting what they want, though they may have something of a dim view of you come sentancing if you didn't give them the key and whatever illegal activity was in the safe. If there was nothing in said safe, and the key really had been lost, the police more or less wasted there time and your not guilty of anything, after all they never found that key either.
However, with encryption it could well take the span of several peoples life times to crack a key needed to unlock the data, hence the law brought in. However if you have genuinely lost the key, or its destroyed, and you have nothing illegal encrypted, say bank details and the like, your going to prison anyway.
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Re:Self-incrimination becoming mandatory (Score:5, Insightful)
The police don't know what evidence is there with certainty until they can access it. If they are given the power to break open a physical lock because they have satisfied a judge (or any other requirement) that they are likely to discover evidence by doing so, that's one thing. However, they can get to that evidence with or without your help.
If they believe that decrypting a drive or file will provide evidence and they can get to that evidence without your help fine. If they can only get to the evidence with your help then they have no evidence. And this law is basically saying that with no evidence they can send you to jail.. because you won't help them prosecute you. Which is kind of contrary to the whole concept of legal trials: how can it be mandatory for you to do the work of the prosecution when you are the defendant?
Elsewhere in the discussion others mention the right to remain silent, and when you ask "isn't this more like police demanding you unlock a door? You can't hide evidence behind a physical lock, so why should a digital lock be different?" then there are a whole bunch of slippery slope questions. Isn't this like the police demanding you tell them where you were at the time of the crime? You can't stop them finding out (but they may never unless you tell them). Who were your accessories? You can't prevent forensics from determining that so you should have to tell them!
But really, let's simplify it:
"You can't hide evidence behind a physical lock, so why should a digital lock be different?"
Because it is different? You can hide evidence behind a digital lock, and you do have the right to remain silent. Sometimes. Apparently.
BTW I am from the UK and I grow more ashamed of the people who govern it almost every day.
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Re:Self-incrimination becoming mandatory (Score:5, Interesting)
Not any more. Now it is:
"You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence."
The reason for the change is that the "right to silence" has gone: if you don't immediately tell the police your defence when you are arrested, the court may ignore anything you say in your trial, and convict you anyway.
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Re:Self-incrimination becoming mandatory (Score:4, Insightful)
The right to silence remains. You do not have to answer any questions. The only thing that changed is that they can now say that you did not answer the questions. Prior to the change in the law the police were not allowed to say that you had not answered their questions and that meant that they could not say that they had asked because it is hard to say that something was asked without saying that there was not an answer. This was obviously a stupid situation and was rectified. If you chose not to answer the police can now tell the court that they asked you and you refused to answer, and that can harm your defence (as you are warned).
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Re:Self-incrimination becoming mandatory (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed. Here's two different videos to drive the point home, one from an attorney [google.com] and the other from a police officer himself [google.com].
Never ever EVER talk to the police. Nothing you can say to them is going to help you. Shut your damn mouth and ask for an attorney.
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What I want (Score:5, Interesting)
One decrypts the files or filesystem while the other key overwrites the contents with random data.
I would also like to know how the authorities could possibly tell a properly encrypted file from one that only contains random data and consequently how they could prove that a filesystem is, in fact, encrypted.
Re:What I want (Score:5, Informative)
Look into the Phonebook filesystem. Not quite what you mentioned, but almost as good.
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Re:What I want (Score:5, Informative)
The issue is no longer whether you can prove their is nothing incriminating in the "ecrypted file" but whether the old memory you've had for 7 months is an encrypted file or not.
Further, TrueCrypt is well known. "Hey, do you have a second 'hidden' partition on this slightly incriminating but pretty inoccuous drive?" "No." "I don't believe you. Do not collect £200."
This is a very, very bad day for the British public.
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Re:What I want (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been thinking about that for awhile. You don't want a system that will destroy the encrypted data - as others have pointed out, the cops will image your drive before they do anything, so it's sort of pointless. But I think you could do even better with a set of one time pads. I'm envisioning a system that works like this:
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Re:What I want (Score:4, Interesting)
That's assuming that the police are drooling morons that have no clue what they're doing. Obviously they'll copy the drive before trying anything on it. You hand over the "wrong" key, data gets scrambled, the restore it from the copy they took and asks for the correct key.
This sounds like a good application for a TPM, don't you think? Isn't that supposed to stop anyone being able to remove data from the machine? (Unless the TPM is backdoored...)
Do modern TPMs have a "suicide" feature that allows them to destroy the secret and create a new one on operating system request? If not, they should have.
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Can I ask.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Can I ask.. (Score:4, Informative)
Obviously, yes.
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Re:Can I ask.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Carefully crack a CD in various places, so that not data can be recovered from it, scrawl on it "Encrytion Keys - Keep Safe" and hide in a stack of CDs.
When arrested, tell them about this CD that has your keys. When they come back and inform you its damaged go psycho screaming at them for having lost your keys, and hence, years of data (cos your back ups are encrypted too right?).
Sue.
Profit!
Ok maybe not, worth a thought though.
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Re:Can I ask.. (Score:5, Insightful)
What if, what if, what if...
No cute little work-around is going to help, because the RIP act was designed as a tool of authoritarianism.
Recently in historical terms, encryption has became essentially unbreakable [wikipedia.org], and this is the backdoor to it all.
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Re:Can I ask.. (Score:5, Insightful)
So? Don't use an empty CD but one with the actual keys. Flip a bit somewhere in the keys.
If they try to decrypt your drive with the key and fail, blame the recovery process.
I think they'd have a pretty hard time proving that the recovery of the keys from the damaged CD was 100% correct. They might get so far as to make it probable, but I know if no way to prove it 100% accurate without the original data to verify it with.
Hmmm, maybe I shouldn't have posted this ... if they find this message and link it to an IP I frequently use ... /me engages in paranoid episode.
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That's rich (Score:5, Insightful)
That's rich. The government convicts people for keeping secrets, and then keeps secrets about who was convicted.
Re:That's rich (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, wait, this is the government. It's probably currently being mailed Second Class to a royal heir in Nigeria.
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Not very surprising historically (Score:5, Insightful)
A hundred years ago today, if someone had a giant safe in their house, and they were suspected of any crime whatsoever, the legal authorities (of pretty much every country in the world, it would baffle me to hear about somewhere this would not be the case) would simply ask for the keys. If the person refused to hand them over, the person gets punished. The "punishment" can be of different forms - whether prison in itself, or just a lot more unfavourable treatment from a judge and the assumption of guilt going against you, but nothing at all? Never. The difference with encryption keys is not all that great.
Re:Not very surprising historically (Score:5, Insightful)
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A thought experiment (Score:5, Insightful)
Suppose I have TrueCrypt installed on my machine, but I don't have anything encrypted. What stops to police from accusing me of having encrypted files and demanding a key? How do I prove random bits of data on my HD are random bits of data and not super secret encrypted files?
I doubt I even need Truecrypt installed for the police to use this to get a guaranteed 2 or 5 year conviction.
Re:A thought experiment (Score:5, Insightful)
To clarify, proving that a section of random bits of data on my hard drive is NOT an encrypted file is equivalent to proving that I am NOT a witch.
This could be easily abused by the police. All they have to do is find a section of random data on a hard drive. Then, the police ask you for a key. When you don't provide one ( because there is no key ), you get convicted on "Refusing To Decrypt Data" charges.
It isn't possible to say with certainty what is random data and what is encrypted data.
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It's an appalling piece of legislation (Score:5, Insightful)
It's an appalling piece of legislation for a number of reasons:
1. It makes forgetting your decryption key/passphrase/whatever illegal. Yes, seriously. The burden of proof is on the accused to show that they can no longer decrypt the data - how the hell do you prove you don't have something?
2. The people who it was originally intended to inconvenience - the real terrorists, if you like - aren't going to be even remotely concerned by it. They know full well that there is a risk they'll be caught and spend time in jail. If it's a choice between "reveal the decryption key, thus providing the police with the only evidence they're likely to find which implicates you and a number of others for so many criminal activities you'll be in prison for 20 years and when you get out you'll get a bullet in the head for the people who you dropped in it" or "keep your mouth shut, go to prison for two years", I wonder which one they'll chose?
Remember this is the UK (Score:5, Interesting)
Somehow, by the time authorities took possession of the computer, the encrypted drive was no longer opened. The last court decision about that case I am aware of states that a subpoena for the encryption key can be enforced, because the government was already aware of the existence of illegal material, and where it was. All they needed was a "key". This is vastly different from demanding a key first, so they can poke around in your private material.
As an analogy, imagine a shed in your yard that you keep locked. Law enforcement would, under almost all circumstances, require probable cause or a warrant based on probable cause in order to go onto your property and search that shed. However, if they already knew, with little doubt, that there was illegal material in that very shed, then they have the legal justification for a warrant, or a subpoena of whatever information is necessary to open the shed.
The solution (Score:5, Interesting)
The solution to this and other similar "bad law" problems is making them big and visible to the common population.
1 - Get a worm that allows to save data on infected computers.
2 - Get an encrypting program that supports plausible deniability.
3 - Infect self with worm.
4 - Install encrypting program in all infected machines.
5 - Accuse random people of having criminal data in their computers. (e.g.: "I was playing a WoW game and this guy told me he had several thousand [criminal data]").
ritual umbrage (Score:5, Informative)
I'm stunned, I don't know why, to see people debating this as if this is the first time the issue has crossed their consciousness. News flash: this has been in the public water supply for at least two decades now. It's important, and if you haven't given it some thought long ago, you're not taking life seriously, you're just a woodpusher in the game theory of human realpolitik.
It boils down to a very simple premise: that entropy is a munition.
If you have some large chunk (say 100MB) of random bits in a file on your computer, there is no way to prove that there isn't some password that will decrypt this block of bits into meaningful information. Any chunk of information content which looks like pure entropy can be accused of harboring munitions, if you're trying to hit the preservation of society nerve, or child pornography, if you're trying to hit the righteousness of the flesh nerve (we all care about flesh). Steganography is the art of boiling a thin soup: very small amount of pure entropy hidden in a huge amount of tedious backdrop (say 200GB of licit pink matter).
If you have a large quantity of real physical entropy, there is of course no way to produce a password, and neither is there any way to prove that the entropy is real.
The authorities find this unbearable, so we are now deep into guilt by association. Caught hanging out with random bits, go directly to jail.
Any public discussion of the matter would conclude that our social concept of judicial fairness is incompatible with this new guilt by association model. What kind of society would declare entropy a munition? How would we all go about scrubbing anything that looks like entropy from our electronic records? It's not clear it is possible to comply with the implications of this, even if greater society drank the Orwellian Spook-Aid.
Hence the secrecy. If the spooks destroy 1000 innocent lives in the course of protecting society as we know it, it appears to be a cost we're going to have to bear.
The easy way to cease to think seriously about this is to invoke Stalinist escalation: that 1000 lives is soon 30 million lives.
Don't be so hasty. Sun Tsu beheaded one giggling princess to make every other princess march with the discipline of soldiers. For his needs, one was enough.
The credit industry doesn't work on principles much better than our agents of darkness. The suits have succeeded in labeling credential fraud as identity theft. Note the slight shift in blame here: it's not the design of VISA at fault (which could hardly be worse), it's your fault for offering up your digits in the first place (well, you can't use your VISA card without doing so, but why niggle?)
I hand pieces of information about myself to thousands of institutions. If the information is gathered and used against me, somehow I'm to blame, not the thousands of institutions who regard protecting the sensitive information they demanded from me as a cost center to be outsourced to India.
The great line in Brazil is "Confess quickly, or you'll jeopardize your credit rating."
Our credit system is nearly as arbitrary and secretive as this business of guilt by entropy. Innocent before proven guilty. The credit system is exempt from our normal social protections against slander. Any merchant can file a damaging untruth about me with little basis in fact, few avenues of complaint, and no ultimate liability whatsoever. The rating agencies will then spread this slander around and I can't prosecute them for spreading damaging falsehoods about me, even if I finally prove that the original merchant lied, and no sensible agency would persist in believing the original claim.
If we're not up in arms about the violation of our social norms concerning slander implicit to the credit industry, I don't harbour much hope that cottage outrage in this forum over incrimination by entropy is going to make any dent in the real world.
Stay tuned for the next exciting chapter, where encryption keys are extracte
This is my password for TC... (Score:5, Funny)
British Police: "Tell us your password."
Me: "For the 100th time, fuck you, I will not tell you my password ever."
British Police: "Oh, you want to be cheeky? Tell us your password or you're going to prison!"
Me: "For the 100th time, fuck you, I will not tell you my password ever."
British Police: "This is a matter of bloody national security, you'll get 5 years!"
Me: "For the 100th time, fuck you, I will not tell you my password ever."
British Police: "He refuses to submit, send him to jail!"
Me: "Great, I'll see you in court. You recorded that conversation, right?"
British Police: ???