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A comment on Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives. Parent comment

Re:Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decry... by bigiain on Sunday February 12, 2017 @07:29PM (#13632124)
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...)

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Re:Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decry... by mirimir on Sunday February 12, 2017 @07:40PM (#13632189)
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 :(

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Re:Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decry... by Natanael_L on Monday February 13, 2017 @03:59AM (#13634021)
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).

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Re:Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decry... by mirimir on Monday February 13, 2017 @09:10AM (#13635270)
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?

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