Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives

Re:Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decry... by terminado on Sunday February 12, 2017 @03:17PM (#13630472)

  "bad guys" who distribute illegal material

Honestly, I fail to see how or why this should be a problem, considering that no actual injuries are inflicted in the storage or possession of ones and zeroes.

Sure, that's an obtuse abstraction, but honestly, the buck stops there. At the end of the day, they have a circuit encoded in a given state. Magnetic media that can be arbitrarily degaussed.

It's not real.

Stop prosecuting it.

So, okay, you wanna argue. Let's get more specific.

Bad things people can "have" encoded on their digital storage media:

  1. stolen economic identifiers, such as credit 
     card numbers, and other mechanisms of fraud

  2. raster graphics and audio depicting nudity, 
     or evidence of events that have since transpired, 
     and prove culpability, via direct participation
     rather than simply the hoarding of collectible
     media files of whatever persuasion

  3. preferences and settings that can correlate 
     identity in other crimes, subscriber information
     such IMEI numbers and MAC addresses, and more

  4. classified information restricted from being
     leaked among state actors or the general public

  5. intellectual property that translates directly
     to business opportunities, insider trading,
     corporate espionage and other white collar 
     crimes

  6. copyrighted music and movies, oh noes!

Listen. If it can fit onto a credit card sized device, it's already too late. So nothing is being stopped by this sort of search.

The demand for relinquishing data, in any such situation is not unlike demanding all the things that people write on napkins and envelopes. Every scrap of paper in someone's pocket. Movie tickets, dry cleaning stubs, match books, and so on. Evidence of a crime? Possibly. Is everyone guilty until proven innocent? Gee, I don't know. Maybe we should just make everyone empty their pockets, and take pictures, just in case.

The fact of that matter is that these are essentially fishing expeditions for item #3.

It's not about "illegal data" at all, nothing is ever going to divert ones and zeroes as contraband. That simply doesn't happen, and doesn't work. It's about coming up with reasons to harass people, as vectors into prosecuting other crimes. Smoking out the paranoid, so that they crack under the pressure of getting sweated down in the hot seat.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decry... by Paul-ish on Sunday February 12, 2017 @04:45PM (#13631098)

If it is all 1s and 0s, I am curious how you feel about the NSA having a good deal of your personal information stored on their drives?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decry... by joncrocks on Monday February 13, 2017 @07:11AM (#13634689)

The obvious retort is that having it on a hard drive isn't the crime, the act of collecting it is. So it's the act and not the possession that is the crime.

I would note as a counter-counter argument that we often make things illegal that are not in themselves harmful, but can lead to harm.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decry... by jessaustin on Sunday February 12, 2017 @05:29PM (#13631407)

Do we get to choose to live in a world where that isn't the case? No? Hey that sounds like a good reason to have fewer laws we can be parallel-constructed into violating.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decry... by herbst on Monday February 13, 2017 @04:02AM (#13634036)

> Do we get to choose to live in a world where that isn't the case?

Kind of. I do my best to avoid any relation with the U.S. including avoiding visiting it, taking up a job or incoorperate there. So even thought i am monitored by some shitty govs, there is no legal way that it means anything.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decry... by Paul-ish on Sunday February 12, 2017 @08:42PM (#13632510)

>Do we get to choose to live in a world where that isn't the case? No?

Why not?

Or, maybe a better question is, why do you think you could legalize child porn easier than we could outlaw or end programs like PRISM?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decry... by followmoney on Monday February 13, 2017 @09:53AM (#13635624)

Few powerful forces oppose legal child porn. Very little money is on the line with CP and very few powerful people would be diminished if CP was legal.

To outlaw or end programs like PRISM you'd have to take on the entire political establishment, the military industrial complex and all branches of the judiciary and law enforcement.

It'd be far easier to legalize CP than do away with PRISM and the like.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decry... by jessaustin on Monday February 13, 2017 @11:11AM (#13636312)

This is the right way to analyze the situation, except we must remember that CP is of instrumental value to the legal racket, which is closely allied to MIC. CP gets them in all sorts of dubious positions, and spending lots of sweet taxpayer money, that they otherwise couldn't justify. "Legalizing CP" wouldn't have the effects we seek on the legal system as a whole, because they'd substitute some other issue (if one had to guess, "intellectual property" probably has the interest of various power players...) so they could continue business as usual.

[ Parent | on HN ]