So do I. There is a selection process. It is not selecting for non-criminality. It isn't selecting for criminality necessarily either, but it certainly is not strongly selecting against, in the sense intended.
* The accused admitted to knowing the password and refused to provide it, on the auspices of not wanting investigators snooping through his files. Only later did they claim to have "forgotten" it.
* Prosecutors entered into evidence multiple factual claims establishing that the accused knew the password; for instance: years of eyewitness testimony demonstrating the accused entering the password from memory.
Whenever you get to an alarming conclusion like "this means forgetting the password to your laptop means life in prison", chances are, you've missed relevant details.
Since the user hasn't been made to recall the password for months, it's plausible that he forgot it. I know I have personally forgotten passwords to accounts after months of disuse.
For instance, I had an old yahoo email account for many years. I didn't use it for about six months before they announced they would start re-purposing accounts that went unused for more than a year. I was unable to remember the password as well as the email account I had associated with that account for password reset. I ended up losing the account.
Tech people have a bad habit of pretending that the uncertainties that our work generates are the first uncertainties the court system has ever dealt with.
But most of criminal law turns in large part --- mens rea --- over a court making decisions about what's in the head of the accused!
I would interpret what is happening as a de-facto trial by judge, not peers, and thus a deprivation of liberty without due process of law, which must include a trial by peers.
That doesn't stop all these uncertainties affecting the outcome ("and the prosecution would like to note that the accused didn't provide the password, pretending that he doesn't remember it/know it" can turn jurors against someone, even if its BS).
How many people were accused and convicted with BS technical certainties (but actual scientific uncertainties) like the bogus "hair matching"?
(Plus practices like the death penalty, private prisons, abuse of solitary confinement for long periods, down to contractors overcharging 10x for prison phone calls. One would compare that with the 3rd world, not the modern Western world).
If anything it needs more limitations to prosecution and uncertainties that work in favor of the state, not less.
The court system didn't make sentences too long. They were dragged there, kicking and screaming, by a polity that overwhelmingly demanded tough-on-crime statutes and tough-on-crime prosecutors, and passed laws to ensure that the courts complied.
This argument is besides the point, though. I'm not saying that contempt rules are OK because the underlying crimes require the state to prove mens rea. I'm saying, the court has for centuries been charged with ascertaining truths that are in some sense unknowable, because they depend on determining what someone was thinking. This isn't a new challenge for the court.
I just had to reset passwords to gitlab root and root on docker image after other admin went on holiday for 3 weeks and forgot both...
>Whenever you get to an alarming conclusion like "this means forgetting the password to your laptop means life in prison", chances are, you've missed relevant details.
Unfortunately responses like the parent comment are predictable on HN. There is the constant narrative that the government is out to get us all. Yet the example given is someone who already has a lot of evidence of child porn, and a frickin police officer no less.
(edit: replaced punishment with detainment, it's probably more neutral)
Yes, probably. I'm not really convinced that this isn't a violation of the fifth amendment, but I'm not a lawyer.
I suspect a jury would find him guilty anyway, and the fact that he refuses to decrypt his hard drive will likely not help his chances of convincing a jury that he's innocent.
(Subtextually, I'm saying: the punishment isn't infinite.)
He's in possession of data deemed contraband, but apparently not linked to distribution. The police need to demonstrate possession and can do so when their search is complete.
The police did an investigation, obtained a warrant to search for the contraband and seized the hard drive. The defendant was ordered by the judge to decrypt the drive per the warrant, and refused to follow the order. He's in contempt of court, and he can get out of jail very easily -- by complying with the order.
nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself
The privilege against self-incrimination applies to any interaction which they introduce into evidence against you in a criminal case, or from which they derive information on which they then gather other evidence that is used against you in a criminal case.
It doesn't actually protect you against the police doing anything, or forcing you to provide information (other Constitutional provisions may, however), it just protects you against certain information being used against you in criminal court.
No, Miranda vs. Arizona set standards for how 5th amendment protections apply in a criminal case, and established remedies for violation of those protections in such case.
And historically, from Jim Crow laws, to J.E. Hoover and McCarthy, and onwards to Snowden, this is wrong, because?
Most of the examples you gave are historical. Regarding Snowden: has anything been used against anyone? I'm not condoning the snooping, BTW.
I think when you compare the US government to the likes of Russia and China, you'll see that the US is really not "out to get you". Certainly in this case it's pretty obvious that the govt isn't out to get an innocent person. There is a lot of strong evidence already that he has been collecting child porn. That of course doesn't mean that illegal procedures should be used to obtain more evidence, but we shouldn't get hysterical about it and say that the govt is going to use this to frame innocent people.
Historical doesn't mean "belonging to lore" or "ain't gonna happen again". It precisely means "this things happen". And I don't consider stuff from 40 and 60 and 80 years ago as "deep history", like it's the Roman times or something and now we're totally different. In some cases those that did or suffered those things are still alive. In others, their direct 1st-gen legacy (sons, proteges, people they mentored etc) still rule.
>I think when you compare the US government to the likes of Russia and China, you'll see that the US is really not "out to get you"
Not sure what this means. With 25% of the world's inmates in only 5% of the world's population, I'd say it's very much out to get a heck of a lot of its citizens. And in prison conditions that compared to places like Germany or Sweden are like third world dungeons. The only way not to see this is to conveniently consider all those people are somehow subhumans, or criminals who "deserve it" (then one has to wonder why in the US 10x more of the population "deserve" such a fate compared to those in the German or the French population).
Or maybe let's talk police shootings? One is much more probable to get shot in the US ('walking while black' et al) than most parts of the world, China and Russia don't even compare.
Or are those not part of the government, and those laws and that climate is not fostered by government policies and political demagogy?
Have you any evidence that the US Government has changed their modus operandi?
Programs like COINTELPRO weren't public knowledge until some time afterwards, ditto "rendition" of terrorism suspects for overseas torture. Snowden has demonstrated that your Government still engages in widespread illegal activity.
I'd say the only reason such abuse seem "historical" is that we're unaware of the abuses going on right now.
That's my point. The US government may or may not be mildly abusing it's citizens by spying on them illegally, it's hard to know. Compare to Russia or China where it most certainly is vehemently abusing people it disagrees with.
Also, I think the rendition was only for non-citizens. The US doesn't really give much of a shit about you if you're not a US citizen.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11...
Was OP's comment edited after you replied? I read nothing implying the OP concludes forgetting one's password means life in prison. I read a seemingly tongue-in-cheek, obviously hyperbolic bit of nonsense about using this as a vector for watching the world burn because people couldn't prove otherwise. Sure, OP is stretching for effect, but it doesn't seem OP missed relevant details.
No, but that's what can happen if providing a password becomes mandatory.
E.g. are you really able to carefully craft a filesystem image that you're sure has no metadata that proves the innocence of the suspect?
Cached images has been enough to put away more than a few folks - there was also recently a story about using exactly that tactic against a suspected spy.
Yes of course you can get an active MiTM session going you can do a lot of shady stuff.
And MiTM is far too simple to do. One of my friends was able to rickroll many a person with about $100 of gear. It was always troubling to watch my computer connect to my home network while at a conference, with no real notification to me.
http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2016/05/14/what-if-youre-in-p...
So data has become new drugs ;)
Also in this case the prosecution apparently has a bit more information that just "he did it":
A subsequent forensic exam of his Mac Pro computer revealed that Doe had installed a virtual machine ... the examiner found one image of what appeared to be a 14-year-old child wearing a bathing suit and posed in a sexually suggestive position. There were also log files that indicated that Doe had visited groups titled: “toddler_cp,” “lolicam,” “hussy,” “child models – girls,” “pedomom,” “tor- childporn,” and “pthc,” terms that are commonly used in child exploitation.
... The exam showed that Doe accessed or attempted to access more than 20,000 files with file names consistent with obvious child pornography... and that he used the external hard drives seized by Delaware County detectives to access and store the images.
Perhaps you have too much faith in law enforcement, or I have grown too cynical by what I perceive as the dawn of a new era of police states.
The police have a fundamentally different argument here than "it happened to be in his possession".
However, that does not mean we can or should change the rules (or define new rules) to put him in jail. I'd prefer they use another way to convict this guy. I'm also careful not to condemn a suspect based on what the media reports about him and his case (the court of public opinion is a dangerous thing).
The fifth amendment is one of the few defenses you can call on when facing the incredibly skewed US legal system, and should not be chipped away at, even in a case like this.
I'm not sure why the case has to stop while the drive remains encrypted then. If they do get the drive decrypted and find nothing (perhaps he held no files and is protesting against forced decryption or they simply have the wrong drive) that will hurt the prosecution.
To me, the judge has basically said you can be locked up indefinitely for accessing suspicious file names. I'm not going to lie though, 20,000 entries would make me pretty fucking suspicious. I think almost all of us would immediately report that to the cops if we saw that in our networks without verifying what's inside.
You can overcome the fingerprints by handing things out for free. Here's a jump drive from some corp. You can also it in a cup holder. The person would touch the jump drive while being a bit perplexed. If you know the person, you can probably get them to hold it for you by simply handing it to them.
Yes, you have to be more involved, but at the same time it's doable.
This applies not merely to Bob in Accounting that's a dick, but to everyone: Congress! Start sniping political enemies. A jump drive here. A hard drive there. Soon, you could have 6 or so Congressional individuals going to jail for a child porn ring. The Feds would think it's a great prisoner dilemma. No one's turning on each other. Again, anonymous tip claiming that the right honorable Representative Duggans was watching kiddie porn late at night in his office. The same tipster told the police that while he was jacking it he thanked Representative O'Connel for the present over the phone (make sure to wait for an actual call so their is evidence).
Sure eventually all of this will die down. Until then, for $100 bucks and a few hours you can sit back, eat some popcorn and watch the system implode. Do it right and you'll get years of fun for everyone.