http://s3.amazonaws.com/InnocentBeyondAReasonableDoubt/PDF/C...

With regards to the allegations of theft, I'm not sure what the author's point is. He repeatedly says he offered to pay the owner back for the missing items. Should that mean that he can't be charged with theft? If I steal something and get caught, should I just be able to offer to pay and avoid prosecution? He repeatedly says that the missing items amount to at most a civil matter, but stealing stuff from work is not a civil matter.

For the rest of it, the author doesn't have a leg to stand on. Say instead of an encrypted partition we were talking about a safe. I kept a safe in my office, and one day I was summarily fired and escorted out of the building. I promised that there was no business information or property of my employer in that safe, then refused to hand over the combination. Should the employer leave it at that, saying "gee, if he says he didn't put any business property in the safe, I guess I just have to believe him!"

I can understand where the author is coming from (though his writing makes that difficult). The owner is clearly being a huge asshole. But the author is being naive to think that there must be something "fishy" going on. Unfortunately for him, he's on the wrong end of this story. It's so common for disgruntled employees to steal company property or damage company property that nobody is going to give him the benefit of the doubt except the jury, who is legally required to. The author repeatedly mentions the standard for conviction (beyond a reasonable doubt). However, that's not the standard for prosecution, which is closer to "more likely than not."

The guy writes: "I was an independent contractor. No employer-employee relationship existed. Federal labor laws afforded me the right to choose when to work, where to work, how to work and what work I was to produce. There were no other work-for-hire contracts or specific performance contracts signed and I did not sign any NDA."

To carry forward with your "safe" analogy: Suppose a plumber came to your house. When he leaves, you demand to search the toolbox he brought to your house. Who's in the right here?

Of course, a private accusation of theft is not an official charge of theft, or a prosecution, or a conviction for it. If a private individual comes to you and accuses you of taking something that belongs to them, and you return it, that ought to be the end of it, unless the victim is really honked off and insists on involving the police. Once the Boys in Blue are involved, it becomes much more difficult to resolve the situation extra-judicially.

What we know is, that the owner claims there was a theft and the (lets call him) contractor offered to reimburse the owner. This does not mean that there was a theft. If I should speculate, it is rather likely that the contractor did loose a laptop, and at this point the relationship was already poisonous enough that the owner either assumes that there was a theft or tries to exploit the missing laptop.

> For the rest of it, the author doesn't have a leg to stand on. [...]

I think this strongly depends (IANAL) and the contractor should get the benefit of doubt. So for example if his .ssh/ directory is on that partition, then he may or may not have ample reason to keep the contents ( e.g. a private key for one of his servers) secret.

Lesson: Do not ever cooperate with the police.

Bo should have just let the original issue (I'm not even sure what that issue was) between he and his employer go to a civil court.

Seriously? So if I get mugged in the street or if I have my home burgled I should do what?

The cops don't have a time machine and they don't give a shit about you getting mugged or your stuff getting stolen. If you work hard enough you might get a police report out of them for insurance purposes.

I don't have a good text source lying around but here's a law professor and a cop explaining the downside: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc

I've posted this before on HN, but will quickly cover it again; A few years ago, my wife was at school and (completely her own fault) left her purse in the class during lunch (this is a medical career school and the class had about 8 students). That night we received a call from Chase asking about a string of purchase attempts using one of her cards - which she then realized was missing. Based on the list of places the card was used, we went to the stores the following day explaining what happened. Once we had done the leg work, confirmed that they would have video surveillance during the time the card was used, we called the police. The officers that showed up went to great lengths to file the report, work with GameStop, Target and Stop&Shop security personnel to not only get us to identify the person, but get video evidence of the crimes at each location. In the end, the classmate who stole the card was prosecuted and served jail time in two separate counties as well as payment of damages (small, but still) for the attempted use of the card which got her nothing in the end. Coincidently, the detective on the case also saw that the girls mom had a warrant out for her arrest so they picked her up as well.

The experience was very positive from our side of things - and perhaps it's not the common experience people hear about, but these officers were very happy to help. As a side note, the county that these officers were in was not a small, nor "safe" county and it wasn't a matter of them not having anything else to do at the time.

All that being said, the original advice of not talking, and knowing your rights should definitely be adhered to if you are on the other side of things. The way everything was used to aide us, can also be used against you. Not all police will treat you the same.

There are some guidelines that I think can help. If you get stopped for a traffic stop and the cop says he wants to take a quick look through your car, you should (respectfully) decline. That can lead to nothing good for you. If you think you might be suspected of a crime (right or wrong), or you don't know why the police want to talk to you, do not go and meet with them. If you get arrested, get a lawyer and let him/her deal with talking to the police. You can talk to the judge if it comes to that.

If they explain that they are investigating a crime and you have some information or evidence they need, go ahead and help them if you are not a target.

Just remember, the police are not your friend. They do not care about your life. They will lie to you and manipulate you if it suits their purpose. However, they do in fact serve an important function, that you may need them someday. Use them for their intended purpose. The system is certainly imperfect, but does work much of the time. I believe the trend towards police wearing body cameras during every interaction can only lead to good things for everyone.

The only thing worse than cops is no cops.

Your experience is almost certainly the common experience for people in your socio-economic group. The common worst case being they do let it slide and you are just left with wasted effort on your part.

The problem is that you have no way of knowing ahead of time if you are going to get an outlier -- a cop who decides there is something hinky about you and focuses on that rather than whatever reason you solicited their help for. It is absolutely a rare event (somewhat less rare for other groups, but still rare). The problem is that the consequences of having one of those rare events happen to you can be life-ruining. It is a very real case of one bad apple spoiling the bunch.

In your example, you had nothing to gain from the culprit's arrest and prosecution. The chance of you ending up on the wrong side of the law was quite small, but not zero. Perhaps the purse was recovered and they found a joint in it - even if the drugs didn't belong to your wife, you risk becoming the target of an investigation.

Given that balance of low-chance, high-consequence risk with essentially zero upside it would make sense for most people in that situation to avoid it completely.

Their job is to get people in front of a judge, to make them pay fines, or to get them into prison. All things being equal, they'll be working with the closest target they can see and that's you if you solicit them. They basically behave like predators.

Where do you live? I want to make sure I never visit there.

At most, do the minimal reporting you have to so. The problem is, as a human you might innocently give the officer some cause to suspect you in some way, or in some way mitigate the crime against you. I know people who have felt more anger after the police turn up to do their thing than they did on discovering the crime.

I would only involve the police in something I felt was very serious, which had to be solved, and could not be solved any other reasonable way. My definition of something very serious? Don't know till it happens, and frankly I'm sure we all have our own ideas of limits.

Burglary wise, don't know about other countries, but here in the UK the only real reason to report a normal burglary is to get a crime number for the insurance company. Mugging is pretty much the same, assuming you have something stolen which is insured. And luckily that can be very minimal, Im think, cant be sure, you can report crime online and get an instant crime number for insurance purposes. I think it probably only worth it is people get physically hurt or something vital is stolen and can't be replaced. Even then...

I lived at the most populous neighbourhood in my city, and so I reported the theft to the police station, they made me enumerate my belongings and gave me some papers stating what I had lost.

A few weeks later, I called to inquire if some advance had been made, and the lady told me "no, we haven't recovered anything"... but I hadn't given her my case number ! So they hadn't recovered anything for anyone.. in a 100.000 people neighbourhood...

At least in my country, if there's no violence or some important reason to go after the criminal, police won't pursue. They don't care much about material losses (they do have a decent track record aprehending murderers and such).

THAT is why you don't take legal advice from them.

Then, as it pertains to the laptop, what the FRICK is Bo doing installing single user pre-boot authentication on a work computer? That is totally out of line, and I wouldn't blame the employer for feeling like his computer was being held hostage by an ex-contractor.

I could see the theft charge in that case. If someone installed password-protected full disk encryption on my computer and refused to give me the password, yes, nothing was physically "stolen", but the fact that I'm being denied access to my own data is more-or-less equivalent.

The fact that Bo then cuts a check to a detective again makes no sense to me. Why are you paying off law enforcement instead of going through the judicial system? Don't forget, going to court is also there to protect you.

This certainly seems like it should be a civil matter, not something to involve the guys with guns and blue suits. But more to the point, $21.50 an hour for a 1099 job for a huge bag-of-dicks of a boss who pirates all his desktop software? Is that BSA hotline still around, or do they even care about small fries?

Are you sure? AFAIK, without signing any contracts, all work I produced is mine, regardless of where it resides. By inference, is all data in my computer mine as well?

Second, in an actual trial the author would have to unlock the encrypted partition. There is no right of privacy against a court. If there is disagreement about what's in a box, people aren't going to sit around arguing about burdens of proof and burdens of production. The court is going to order the box be opened and the issue resolved definitively.

Your reasoning and my reasoning are the current modes of thought about encryption in a legal context. Neither has been proved correct in that context.

I still find it troubling that there's no burden of proof to violating someone's privacy before the court (there also doesn't seem to be any guarantee that decrypting the partition before the court would be done behind closed doors). But I guess there are many privacy issues not currently well addressed by U.S. laws...

[1] http://www.innocentbeyondareasonabledoubt.com/

http://s3.amazonaws.com/InnocentBeyondAReasonableDoubt/PDF/C...

Next lock boxes and safes!