Judge Orders Child Porn Suspect To Decrypt His Hard Drives 802
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."
Re:What kind of encryption did the FBI break? (Score:2, Informative)
One time pad is your only hope
apparently (Score:3, Informative)
Re:FBI shits on the constitution. (Score:5, Informative)
The Judge never said the FBI couldn't have a go at it, just that the suspect couldn't be compelled to hand over the decryption information because of lack of evidence.
Once the FBI had some success of their own and found evidence, then the judge changed his mind.
Re:Here's his best defense.. (Score:4, Informative)
He should inform the honorable judge that he's forgotten the decryption parameters or whatever they are called.
This way, he puts the ball back into their court. That is, to prove that he indeed still remembers these parameters.
Not at all. First, informing the judge that he's forgotten the decryption parameters would have been an awful stupid move. "Having forgotten" would have implied that he once knew them, which would have been proof that the hard drives were his. Second, since the drives are now known to be his because the FBI encrypted a drive, refusing to decrypt would now be taken as evidence that he's got something to hide, basically an admission of guilt.
Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
Pedophiles are animals, and don't deserve rights.
You are an idiot, and I doubt if you even understand what pedophilia is. Most pedophiles are not child molesters. Most child molesters are not pedophiles. Pedophilia is a psychological condition that causes someone to be sexually attracted to prepubescent children. But most people that feel this attraction do not act on it (since to do so is a serious crime). Most people charged as child molesters, on the other hand, are not pedophiles. They are not attracted to prepubescent children. Instead they are attracted to teenagers that are legally children, but biologically most certainly are not.
But the defendant in this case has not been accused of either pedophilia (which is not a crime) nor child molestation. He has been accused of possessing child pornography, which is a crime even if no actual children are involved. Computer generated animation, or even a pencil sketch can get you arrested. You want to castrate people for drawing pictures?
Re:Here's his best defense.. (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/02/what_happens_wh.html [schneier.com]
Re:constitutional rights should be absolute (Score:4, Informative)
(Note: I am not an american citizen and my understanding of the american legal system is therefore limited)
Most American citizens have less of an understanding of how the courts work than you just displayed, in my experience.
In cases like this, the lower judge can make orders which are right or wrong and if you don't think his judgement is correct, you are welcome to appeal to the appeals court. Appeals then allow for the correction of lower court errors and if you don't like the appeals court decision, you are free to try and get the next higher court to hear an appeal.
In federal cases the appeals process ends at the Federal Supreme Court, which can choose to allow an appeal to be argued, overturn the lower court, or simply let the ruling stand as is and not do anything. Usually by the time a case can get to the Supreme Court it will have taken years since someone has been convicted and sentenced. There are similar paths for local and state courts as well as civil and criminal courts. With appeals to a higher court allowed for decisions made in lower ones. But this process is time consuming, expensive, and is likely to take years and years of waiting.
So the individual citizen can, if he has the time and money (or can find somebody who thinks this is important enough to provide the necessary legal services) can keep filing timely appeals and "fight his way to the top." (Or at least as high as the judges will allow).
In this case, I suspect that there will be a number of appeals based on the less than ideal constitutional grounds of the order, but I'm guessing that this guy will either provide the information or be held in contempt and have to appeal.
You live in fairy tale land (Score:2, Informative)
they're trying to set a legal precedented to override the 5th for future cases, IMHO.
I am not a lawyer, but I suspect that even the most evil SC we can imagine will determine that if a suspect is not subject to prosecution in the absence of an action, then that action is protected.
Imagine again. The Rhenquist SC (generally less evil than the current Roberts SC) said http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herrera_v._Collins [wikipedia.org] that provable actual innocence of a crime is no reason to bar a State from executing someone once they've been sentenced by a court.
An SC that says we can execute someone who can prove they did not commit the crime would certainly be able to authorize anything a prosecutor wants to do. Ironically the generally-more-evil Roberts SC today issued a ruling that substantially undoes the one I cited.
Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
No. Besides, she looks like she's 17, not 7.
But child pornography, in most instances is not depicting sex with children, but sex with underage minors, for instance, a 17 year old, or someone who looks like they are 17.
Yes, people who want to have sex with children is wrong, but the law is expanded far beyond this and people get crazy with the CP label because the law is far too wide. Just like peeing in your back yard can get you slapped with a "sexual offender" label for life, so can publicizing photos of your 25 year old girlfriend who looks 17 get you labeled as a CP distributor.
This is why I don't jump off the deep end and call this guy a monster. For all we know the CP he enjoys looking at is 20 year old women that look young. I sure wouldn't fault him for that. If it is photos of kids, then I agree, he is one sick bastard. But we don't know that, because the law is too broad, so why assume? it just gets you worked up. If you were a juror, that is exactly what they would be going for, too.
Re:You live in fairy tale land (Score:3, Informative)
Reading that wikipedia link it's about a claim of innocence, not proven innocence.
Hearsay about a man who can't defend because he's dead vs. a witness, a confession, and the killers Social Security card next to the victim is pretty weak.
(For the record, I am against the death penalty)
Re:What kind of encryption did the FBI break? (Score:4, Informative)
>> an intricate electronic folder structure comprised of approximately 6,712 folders and subfolders, approximately 707,307 files
Sounds like a regular disk drive structure to me. Nothing particularly "intricate" about it.
Indeed. I'm writing this from a fresh Windows 7 install (about 36hrs old) and the c:\windows folder alone has over 17,000 folders and 100,000 files.
Re:What kind of encryption did the FBI break? (Score:5, Informative)
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.