VW_Factor
Regular Member
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/01/judge-orders-laptop-decryption/
Anyone else hear about this?
Anyone else hear about this?
A judge on Monday ordered a Colorado woman to decrypt her laptop computer so prosecutors can use the files against her in a criminal case.
The defendant, accused of bank fraud, had unsuccessfully argued that being forced to do so violates the Fifth Amendment’s protection against compelled self-incrimination.
Before I would venture an opinion, I'd want to know what the courts have decided in matters involving locked automobiles, locked houses and businesses, locked boxes and locked safes.
I don't see a material difference between something being encrypted (software locked) file and something being physically secured (hardware locked).
Before I would venture an opinion, I'd want to know what the courts have decided in matters involving locked automobiles, locked houses and businesses, locked boxes and locked safes.
I don't see a material difference between something being encrypted (software locked) file and something being physically secured (hardware locked).
The difference is in being forced to act against your own interests.
A lock can be picked. A door can be kicked.
And encryption can be broken. People decrypt sensitive information all the time. If the state wants the data they should take the time to decrypt it themselves. If it were me in the case, I would not do it even under court order. No Way No How.
n June 2003, the U.S. Government announced that AES may be used to protect classified information:
... and a super-computer is capable of its own brand of brute force and of monstrous cost. Unintended constitutional consequences may be part of the monstrous cost.The difference is in being forced to act against your own interests.
A lock can be picked. A door can be kicked.
... and a super-computer is capable of its own brand of brute force and of monstrous cost. Unintended constitutional consequences may be part of the monstrous cost.
Good people ought to be armed as they will, with wits and Guns and the Truth.
In June when it hit 1 quadrillion calculations per second, or one petaflop, it consumed 9.89 megawatts of power
Source: The Inquirer (http://s.tt/14cSy)
Win 7 Bitlocker (AES 128 or 256bit in this case) encryption is pretty beefy. It would take enormous amounts of computing power an untold amount of time to even think about cracking 256bit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard
Good luck with that.
"Stochastic tinkering" is trimming the problem to fit the frequentists' statistical framework fallaciously.Taleb said:His book The Bed of Procrustes summarizes the central problem: "we humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas". Taleb disagrees with Platonic (i.e., theoretical) approaches to reality to the extent that they lead people to have the wrong map of reality rather than no map at all. He opposes most economic and grand social science theorizing, which in his view suffer acutely from the problem of overuse of Plato's Theory of Forms.
Relatedly, he also believes that universities are better at public relations and claiming credit than generating knowledge. He argues that knowledge and technology are usually generated by what he calls "stochastic tinkering" rather than by top-down directed research.
And encryption can be broken. People decrypt sensitive information all the time. If the state wants the data they should take the time to decrypt it themselves. If it were me in the case, I would not do it even under court order. No Way No How.
I am not saying it will be easy. I am saying it can be done. I am a programmer so I am well aware of encryption.
I further read the judges orders:
1) The court is asking that she decrypt her hard drive on her laptop for a case against her husband
2) The court has given HER full immunity from anything they find on the laptop
3) A separate search warrant was requested and granted specific to the laptop due to a phone conversation make between the defendant and the wife
4) The prosecution has already tried to decrypt said hard drive and failed
The judge seems to be stretching some circumstances in existing cases to make this sound more constitutional however even after reading it, I don't see how he could side with prosecution and I personally would still not provide unencrypted hard drive if anything on there could implicate my significant other.
Ruling: http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2012/01/decrypt.pdf