There are other precedents I think.

Here (Sydney Australia) the penalty for refusing a roadside alcohol test is the same as the top range blood alcohol penalty. So you can refuse a test, and they'll penalise you assuming the worst-case result you could have produced.

I'm guessing this guy is in a quite perplexing quandary - he's betting on whether they'll keep him in jail for as long for refusing to decrypt the drives as they would for the crimes that decrypting the drives expose?

(At least I _hope_ that's his quandary - I sincerely hope the reality isn't that he's genuinely forgotten the passwords, and when the FBI/NSA _finally_ bruteforce it, they end up with baby photos, teenaged angst poetry, and a few bittorrented Hollywood movies... That does, at least, seem quite unlikely...)

If he was using Freenet, there's no doubt that his node handled chunks of CP files, and that at least some of those chunks remain on the drive. Let's say that he never viewed any CP. Even then, can he be sure that investigators won't discover evidence that could be spun to demonstrate that he did view CP?

It is quite a quandary :(

If you didn't request it, your node won't hold decryption keys to the files.

Might not help him if they believe that the encrypted keyless fragments is enough (which would be a horrible legal argument).

That's true, of course.

But LEA are selecting nodes based on the hashes of those fragments. Many of them won't have cached CP fragments, but merely relayed them. But if his node did, prosecutors could argue that they've identified CP on his computer based on hashes, and have experts testify about reliability, etc. How many jurors would understand Freenet design?

He's not jailed for having CP. He's jailed for contempt.

How can they prove he is in contempt of the court? Someone who forgot the password would very well be found in contempt of the court, despite not doing anything wrong. How can you jail someone for being in contempt of the court when there is no proof that he has the password?

In fact, it seems dangerous for the judge to be able to jail anyone without a jury verdict. It seems to bypass legal protections.

> But without 100% proof he can't be jailed.

The standard is not "100% proof". Perhaps you should learn something about the legal system.

The standard for US criminal law is "proof beyond a reasonable doubt". I think "100% proof" is a close enough summary of that phrase... If the proof doesn't 100% convince the jury, then reasonable doubt still exists and prosecution should fail.

Beyond reasonable doubt can admit that doubt does exist, it's just not reasonable to entertain it. 100% proof strongly implies that there is no doubt at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_doubt

I don't think there's a difference. For instance, let's say we have a video of little Timmy shoplifting a candy bar. Clear face shot, maybe the video even has sound and there's a vocal-print match. Pretty slam-dunk case, right? Not much room for reasonable doubt there.

Oh, but you see, little Timmy was actually being telepathically controlled by a diabetic alien about to pass out from hypoglycemia, who had him steal the candy bar. Can you prove this was not the case?

This is what reasonable doubt protects against. There will always be the ability to create a (probably fanciful) scenario in which the defendant is not guilty. An unreasonable scenario, one might even say. Being able to convince the jury beyond reasonable doubt is as close to 100% proof as you are reasonably going to ever get.

> Beyond "the shadow of a doubt" is sometimes used interchangeably with beyond reasonable doubt, but this extends beyond the latter, to the extent that it may be considered an impossible standard. The term "reasonable doubt" is therefore used. [Emphasis mine]

I understood that reference to "Impossible standard" to mean from a jurisprudence perspective.

If you want to insist that "100% proof" and reasonable doubt are the same, that's of course your choice. I think you'll find that people will tend to disagree with you.

Fair enough. I think anything beyond this point dives pretty fast into a philosophical debate on "knowability", which I don't think either of us are actually interested in. Cheers.

Indeed! I'm sure there's a lot of great judicial literature on the topic if you're interested in diving further. My armchair is pretty comfy though, and I think I'm likely to doze off before getting too deep into it. :)

That seems like a silly distinction. It's easy to come up with "unreasonable doubt" for any argument.

"I doubt that, because a fairy whispered something to me in my sleep."

I've expressed my layman's understanding of reasonable doubt. How does your understanding differ?

> I think "100% proof" is a close enough summary of that phrase...

Not even close.

Do you have any refutation to the logic in the rest of my post? Or is "nope neener neener" the only thing I get?

That's just semantics. He's jailed without a conviction at this point.