Privacy, encryption and kiddie porn

[Roofus]

Can't be arsed to find a link, but Leo Laporte saw fit to mention it in two of his podcasts.

The gist of the story is that an American was coming back from Canada and, as is common these days, the American authorities demanded that he show them what was on his laptop (we'll save that discussion for later...) He did and they found some very questionable files with filenames too vile to repeat (the least offensive being "Preteen Bondage.") When confronted, the guy admitted to downloading porn and every so often, he'd "accidentally" download child porn, but, of course, he'd immediately delete it. Except, of course when he immediately encrypts it; which he did this time. When asked for the password to decrypt the files, he refused so he was arrested.

At trial, the judge ruled that the guy was protected from giving the password under the fifth amendment because it put him in "the impossible trilemma of being in contempt of court, incriminating himself or obstructing justice." The key here seems to be that because he never wrote the password down, he can't be forced to reveal it.

Much as I'd like to be against the ruling, I do believe in the Constitution, and I do think it's important to err on the side of protecting rights than taking them away, which seems to happen more and more often these days.


And before we get into "What about the children?!" territory, all they had are the file names. and that's perfectly sufficient to get a warrant. I'd be willing to bet that he's got an unencrypted video, or some pictures on his laptop or computer at home.

[Ex-Cyber]

I'm tempted to think that he set up this situation intentionally. It seems a little unlikely that he really wanted to make the files inaccessible, yet bothered to make them visible enough for a cursory examination to discover their presence (although people have certainly done stupider things in the name of security). It would be pretty funny to see the court compel him to give the password, only for the police to find some blue-eyed soul. .

Anyway, I wonder how they'd react to someone with a multi-boot setup having, say: Linux, BSD, Plan 9, FreeDOS, and Amithlon...

[mankrip]

Couldn't they just bruteforce the password?

[butters]

The last time I read about this story, it said that the files were unencrypted at the time the police confiscated the laptop, which means they had been recently accessed and the police could watch the videos. When they got the laptop to the station, they discovered that the files were encrypted.

[APE]

The last time I read about this story, it said that the files were unencrypted at the time the police confiscated the laptop, which means they had been recently accessed and the police could watch the videos. When they got the laptop to the station, they discovered that the files were encrypted.

Not sure how that would work but I'm going to go and do a full disk encryption on my laptop solely because of it's nature as a portable machine and my data is on it. Do I have anything to hide? Yeh, my personal information.

Aside from that the file names are only incriminating. I'd be tempted to rename and pad hello.jpg a million times knowing full well that they would have to document each and every one.

[SuperMegatron]

Couldn't they just bruteforce the password?

Yeah, but this isn't about the file its about his refusal to give the password.