Send me your photos and I'll encrypt them for you!
I think the law is very vague due to the people writing it now knowing much about it. I imagine they have a use case of this guy and want jail for anything other than seeing some incriminating evidence.
I guess it doesn't help that it turned out he did know the password and it had a load of incriminating stuff on.
What if I have just erased my USB-stick with good dose of /dev/random and haven't actually formatted it to any filesystem yet. Good encryption is indistinguishable from randomness, so could they blame me for not giving up password and jail me for carrying randomness in my pocket?
In many countries they can jail you for failure to disclose encryption keys – for example, in the UK you could spend two years in jail unless you could convince the court that there was in fact no encrypted data on that USB key:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#United_Kingd...
Re:Are passwords stored in memory safe?
by 0xdeadbeefbabe on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @03:48PM
(#7066045)
If they did arrest you for that, but you aren't really Jack Bauer you could at least get points on hn for writing the story of "How I was arrested for carrying random data on my usb stick"
Second, I am not sure I understand the judge decision. If the man truly forgot it, or lets say the files on USB got corrupted (can happen) and the password he is giving out does not work, then how can you continue to jail him (for that reason)? Is this something specific to UK, or are similar US cases out there?