What has happened to tax havens is they are labeled tax non-compliant and then an IGO effectively embargoes them unless they turn over all tax records and come into compliance with their laws. So the same thing would apply to creating an island nation to evade some cryptography export law, or content restriction.
I don't think convincing the respective governments with arguments will work either because the incentive they have to require censorship on internet content that they are not mentioning is that they can censor it for their own purposes. For example, Russia is considering blocking Twitter entirely for having illegal content (you know what I mean by this) but I think everyone knows that's not the real reason they are considering blocking Twitter.
I don't know what the best solution is.
It probably won't work for "just people", without strong lobby powers and corrupting financial temptations dangled before politicians.
IMHO there's no running away from resisting/circumventing oppressive legislation in our social surroundings, not by looking for far-away havens.
This has always been a fascinating concept to me as well — but I think history demonstrates that you can't just set up a safe haven without significant international leverage, whether financial or military. And if you're actively exporting "munitions" to other countries, it's only a matter of time until someone tries to knock you off.
The more likely scenario is that your safe haven will be dependent on a larger nation-state patron—and therefore ultimately vulnerable to changes in its domestic politics. (E.g. Israel, or Taiwan.)
It's difficult to build leverage in a country the size of an island—and once you're big enough to have any leverage, autarky becomes nearly impossible as you're always dependent on someone else for logistical reasons (food, fuel, etc.). This is essentially what the Second World War was fought about; autarky lost.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140116/09195525902/uk-ma...
You can Google more easily...
From your own link - he said he forgot the password, which(I assume) in itself wasn't enough to prosecute, it was the fact that he eventually caved in and provided it 4 months later, so they got him on purposefully obstructing justice for 4 months. It's not clear if he could be successfully prosecuted for this crime if he never remembered the password.
"Judge Christopher Parker did not accept Nicholson's "wholly inadequate" excuse that providing his password would expose information relating to cannabis."
So basically he said "I know the password, but I'm not going to tell you". That's obstructing justice.
My point is if you say you don't remember and maintain saying you don't, can you be persecuted purely on this one law. Because so far it looks like you can't.
I've long wished most of the American constitution made it's way over to Britain. We've had many of the freedoms enshrined in it for centuries but a few, particularly the principle of freedom of speech, has been trampled over in the internet age.
On the one hand, there is federal precedent (https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca3/17...) that the government must be able to demonstrate both that the defendant knows the password and that criminal evidence is known to exist on the device. The bar for both of these things appears to be fairly high.
On the other hand, there is precedent at the state level in Pennsylvania (https://law.justia.com/cases/pennsylvania/supreme-court/2019...) that disclosure of passwords is testimonial in nature and therefore always (I think?) protected, even if you admit both to knowing the password and to the existence of criminal evidence.
Note the different jurisdictions for the precedents here. In federal courts that fall under the third circuit (which includes Pennsylvania), the first one applies. In state courts within Pennsylvania, the second one applies. This oddity won't change until and unless the US Supreme Court chooses to hear a relevant case. So in Pennsylvania, the law is currently different depending on if the FBI or the local police is the one prosecuting you.
Also note that from the first case, failure to provide the password is a form of civil contempt and therefore confinement is limited to 18 months at most.
The police think Bob has material that they need to see.
They think that:
The key, password, code is in the possession of the person given notice.
Disclosure is necessary in preventing or detecting crime.
Disclosure is proportionate.
The protected material cannot be obtained by other reasonable means.
Bob can ignore this. But that means he may be guilty of an offence under S53.
One of the defences available is to say that he's not in possession of the key. He'd have to persuade the court that either He'd forgotten the key or your encryption was set up in a way that he'd never had the key in a memorable form.
> For the purposes of this section a person shall be taken to have shown that he was not in possession of a key to protected information at a particular time if—
> (a)sufficient evidence of that fact is adduced to raise an issue with respect to it; and
> (b)the contrary is not proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
So, to answer your question: yes, a person could be prosecuted, and they'd have to prove they forgot the key. The prosecutors wouldn't have to prove that the key had not been forgotten.
If you're providing part of your password you run the risk that
i) you'll be convicted of the S53 RIPA offence (potentially 2 years for most stuff, potentially 5 years for child sexual exploitation or terrorism)
and
ii) they'll decrypt it somehow and you'll also be convicted of the original offences.
Criminals are well aware of the trade-offs of the English courts. Do you plead guilty at the earliest opportunity (and get a reduction in sentence as a result) or do you wait until the day of the trial (because many trials collapse before they get to court).
This is actually more because criminals on balance tend to be too dumb to hide their traces than because of any demographic truth. There are a lot of criminals.
Focusing on "crypto" is, I think, a forest for the trees argument. Look instead at anonymity for evidence of where this kind of thing goes. Put up any reasonably anonymous forum where people can interact without their identities being reveals (which often includes, but doesn't always require, some kind of crypto protocol). Within a year it will be filled with criminals. Minor criminals like drug dealers. Worse things like market manipulation and fraudsters. Weapons sales. Black market rings. Revolutionaries of all sorts and sizes. Child porn. Mail order brides and other trafficking trades.
Seriously, run a Tor exit node for a while and see where this goes.
Your neighbors in your imagined "safe haven country for cryptographers" aren't going to be who you think they are.
I wish there was some sort of island of safe haven country setup by compiler developers where C didn't have problems with memory safety.
Why is politics the only domain where HN'ers think they can make the domain's problems disappear entirely by moving it physically to an island? It's inane.
It’s very interesting to read about, thanks.
We could export code containing cryptographic algorithms to countries that need it for privacy and safety reasons. Cryptography actually is needed for safety more than it is used by undesirable people to commit crimes!