Human rights activist risks prison over refusal to disclose password to police
middleeasteye.net
middleeasteye.net
Unfortunately, the only real constrain for it to not continue to exist would be to cost some people their political career due to media/public backlash and such.
No, you've misunderstood that. The article mentions that he's been stopped previously, and asked for his passwords, and has declined before without being arrested.
So maybe that low arrest rate is a glimmer of hope: they could be arresting many more people.
It still sucks, and it clearly needs reform which is unlikely under current or future governments.
The UK is weirdly comfortable with massive levels of surveillance.
Maybe, I mean I don't know about "most voters" to be honest. I certainly feel like we're defeated and will be walked all over for the rest of our sad existence
preferably I'd be able to configure certain directories that should be wiped, so only confidential data is destroyed.
then it would log in normally. I doubt silly borderguards would realize the pwnage
Better that way then they won't dig more into the phone.
I'm not a lawyer, but that was my interpretation in case that's wrong.
There wasn't a crime, until you deceived officers. It doesn't matter if you deceived them to cover up a crime, or to protect your privacy, or just for fun, it's still illegal.
This being illegal is equally as bad them searching devices in the first place without just cause.
> For all the authorities know, it was a clean device i.e., brand new
Just because you can get away with something doesn't mean it isn't a crime.
Lying to or misleading investigators is a crime, I don't know how to be more clear than that.
I would argue their invasion of privacy is a crime but no one is watching the watchers, thus these types of measures are going to be used.
The argument is that authorities can't force you to lie to me, in order to get your machine unlocked. And you don't need to lie to them, either.
But of course, you'd need to trust me implicitly ;)
But even so, once I had remote SSH access to initramfs, and had unlocked LUKS, I could mount /root and mess with the system, adding my own trusted key for remote access, etc.
So basically, users would need to trust me fully.
I'm not a lawyer, but I'm fairly sure they can compel me to lie to you. I think the standard is that the police can, at least with a warrant, compel you to do anything that you would do normally. For instance, if you're a company that keeps a database of user actions, they can compel you to give them access to that database, because accessing that data is a part of your normal business process. They can even compel you to write some software to extract the specific data they need (within reason). And in your scenario, I am able to access my own computer, and do so regularly as part of my normal life.
You probably came up with this scenario thinking about so-called "warrant canaries," which hinge on law enforcement not being able to force companies to lie to their users. But it should be noted there is no case law or precedent regarding warrant canaries, and the legal consensus seems to be it is unlikely to hold up in court.
listen to the hummingbird, whose wings you cannot see,
listen to the hummingbird, don't listen to me.
#LeonardCohenpic.twitter.com/PZisFt6mHm
— riseup.net (@riseupnet) November 11, 2016
How about this. When you use my FDE as a service, part of my payment is selling your computer to me for a nominal fee. So you're never using your computer, you're using mine. And my lease agreement requires confirmation that you're not under compulsion.
Fantasizing a bit, one can imagine a multi-probe EEG net that could report your state of mind. Perhaps the remote processor could be trained to recognize coercion, nervousness, etc.
You can't have a "no cops" requirement in a lease agreement, that wouldn't be remotely enforceable.
> Fantasizing a bit, one can imagine a multi-probe EEG net that could report your state of mind
Ordinarily, at this point, the warrant would then be given to you, not me. This is complicated by the fact that you presumably are trying to stay anonymous and there are questions of jurisdiction. But they will at least try to contact you and compel you to give them access. If you refuse now you're committing a crime, and they'll go after you. So you'd better hope your OPSEC is solid. And, after a certain point of ridiculousness, they might go after me, saying I purposefully used this system to elude lawful requests for access (which would be true!). That's going to be tricky to prove, and at that point I don't have enough legal knowledge to figure out if that holds up.
And anyway, as said elsewhere, at some point you are opposing a government. And if you're opposing in a strong way, then well, you basically declared war and you'll have to fight the Goliath. Thus before attempting any fight, make sure you have a very good network of supporters...
Technology won't help :-(
So I'll use Tor and Tox to hide myself as long as possible. But when the bad guys rings my bell, I know the only way out is to burn everything. They won't be deterred by some 2048 bits password...
Based on an OPSEC risk assessment, it may seem rather unlikely that the NSA and other national intelligence agencies are adversaries. Why would they care about Mirimir?
However, I find it useful to assume that they are. And so I employ many countermeasures that might seem foolish. Basically, I do whatever is workable. And then I write about it for income and pleasure. I do keep in mind, however, the "possibility that [a] countermeasure could create an OPSEC indicator" (DoD OPSEC manual at p. 14).[0]
But burning everything, that's also obstruction, I think.
0) https://www.OPSECprofessionals.org/official/081103_DOD_OPSEC... OPSEC manual
You're always better off to pass all communications through a lawyer. They're not allowed to lie to a lawyer.
Why not instead just refuse, and use the technicality of violation of privacy, to beat the authorities by making anything they find inadmissible in the first place?
(I'm assuming US-centric here, of course.)
But if you are protecting your privacy (personal documents etc.) or your companies privacy (source code, plans, etc.) then you've still lost.
The deletion password would work, as long as they don't image the drive first and use your software to decrypt.
More info in this question: https://superuser.com/questions/986387/why-does-my-ssd-inter...
If this wasn't the case, you do these sorts of obstructions to trick officers into never laying charges for the crime you committed. You might respond, "well shouldn't they be charged with the crime they committed in that case, not the obstruction stuff?" And they can be charged for that as well, but often the obstruction, especially the destruction of evidence, makes it impossible to actually get a conviction.
Right, technical cleverness is the lawyer's job. If you get arrested on any serious charges in the US politely tell the police that you need to speak to a lawyer.
You still don't have to answer questions and should never answer questions until you can consult with a lawyer.
The classic video from a law professor and former criminal defense attorney, with a response from an active police detective.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
"I will never talk to a police officer under any circumstances"
Given that most people talk too much to the police most of the time without dire consequences (police have a lot of flexibility in what they can do with your volunteered information, it's a two-edged sword) a more careful cost-benefit analysis of saying nothing or saying certain things is irresistible to smart tech people. If you're going to take the principled 'never talk under any circumstances' approach you need to have thought of various situations so you can make that principle work the most for you and not let it become an unnecessary cost.
... or destroys evidence with the intent to interfere with an investigation (usually) by a law-enforcement, governmental, or regulatory authority.
But many individuals do what they can. Consider the increase in encryption use.
If we leave law aside and think only in terms of "sides," that means that he is "opposed" to these governments, and it would only make sense for them to be hostile to him using their powers (arrest, taking his laptops, etc).
Now let's continue to leave the law aside, because that's what our governments can do when they please, usually by not telling us (Snowden showed us this several years ago in no uncertain terms).
So, human rights or no, a hidden-partition mechanism is merely allowing a civilian to use the same tools a government is - non-legal ones. In an ideal world, everybody (governments and civilians) would follow perfectly fair laws. That's not this world, those aren't our governments, so we all should be open to resorting outside the legal system to protect ourselves.
(Widely circulated, unimplemented idea which some people believe actually exists.)
It's as if you've created a computer game for the cops in which they have one "life", before "game over". But they can easily defeat that by "saving the game" before the risky encounter with your data-eating password monster, to give themselves as many lives as they wish.
For example, a traveller will be questioned about his family in Pakistan. It's a criminal offence not to answer. However the threat that is used is that the person will be detained for long enough that they miss their flight. They'll need to rebook it at 4X the cost with no guarantee they'll be allowed to board the next flight either. These powers are being abused to coerce and haven't been properly tested in court.
The UK should restore the right to silence.
I really doubt they care in the slightest about that.
But perhaps this is the government we deserve as we vote them in, they reflect what is within ourselves.
The awful treatment of non-white UK citizens at our borders is another problem again, quite possibly due in part to the institutional racism that still exists in our police forces.
All this data is being stored and shared too, so your passwords, contacts, travel history and web history will be sitting in datacenters forever, just in case you might be useful to them later.
We all hate those laws. We hate the TSA. We hate the border control overkill checks. We hate the "give us the password" bullshit.
We hate it so much when something suspicious may be happening we automatically assume the suspect is the victim.
Somewhere down the road the gov messed up so bad it's guilty by default until proven innocent into the eye of people on HN, a group of usually pretty well educated people.
That is a red flag.
Last time I traveled to the US was in 2013. The TSA were a bother, but didn't really stand out compared to US immigration checks, airline policies, being contained in an airplane for 12 hours, my country fiscal policies on return, finding taxis to go from airport to destination and everything.
Yes, the TSA thing is aggravated by it being useless, but I don't expect any general population to know this.
They've clearly denounced extremist Islam.
It's the difference between me publishing your videos to my YouTube feed and PewDiePie publishing your videos up to his feed.
This is why people worry, with some justification, about YouTube censoring content. And, symmetrically, it's enough for other people to complain, again with some justification, that YouTube isn't censoring enough content and should be punished for that.
Cage denounced his extremist views, and at their events he only spoke about imprisonment.
Note that the imprisonment is probably what radicalised him - he was known as a moderate before he was detained.
"Due process is the legal requirement that the state must respect all legal rights that are owed to a person. Due process balances the power of law of the land and protects the individual person from it. When a government harms a person without following the exact course of the law, this constitutes a due process violation, which offends the rule of law."
I think the important point to note is that the 'digital strip search' mentioned is used in an arbitrary way and is a great power in the hands of folks not particularly careful about abusing it.
Alright, so all the Christian pressure groups should get that kind of treatment in your view then?
If not, given CAGE isn't pro-terrorist and is simply pro-Islam, you even pointing that out is...really questionable judgment on your part.
So your argument is torture is OK because they are convicted terrorists?
Or that the US military is pro-Terrorist?
> For example, Cage is animated about the case of Aafia Siddiqui, jailed for 86 years in the US for attempting to murder US officials in Afghanistan and assaulting those who tried to stop her. Siddiqui had wide-ranging links to al-Qaeda and was married to a key plotter behind the 9/11 attacks. At the beginning of her trial she said that jurors should be "subject to genetic testing" to see if they were Zionist or Israeli. She is no terror suspect – her guilt was proved in a court of law. Yet Cage’s profile on Siddiqui – which misses literally all this out – says it has "dedicated itself" to freeing her.
> Aafia Siddiqui and her three children were kidnapped from the streets of Karachi in March 2003. Since then they have been subjected to enforced disappearances, torture and ill-treatment beyond measure. Cageprisoners has dedicated itself to campaigning for Aafia and her family in order to help secure their release and expose those involved in their abuse.
> Others that Cage support include Djamel Beghal, who, following allegations of a plot to blow up the US embassy in Paris, was jailed in France in 2005 for "belonging to a criminal association in relation to preparing an act of terrorism"; and Nizar Trabelsi, convicted in Belgium as part of an al-Qaeda plot to carry out a suicide attack against a military base there holding US soldiers.
> Le Point reported that the Emirati police had been sharing information with the French authorities since the beginning of August 2001. Questions being asked of Beghal confirmed for him that it was the French who were feeding information to the Emirati police during his torture and abuse.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/10/20/al-qaeda-terror-leader-...
> Anwar Al-Awlaki may be the first American on the CIA's kill or capture list, but he was also a lunch guest of military brass at the Pentagon within months of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, Fox News has learned.
No, it is not.
Then your assertion they are pro-terrorist doesn't make any sense.
Helping to free people who were tortured at some point during their captivity isn't the same as being "pro-terrorist".
Being a civil rights group that opposes mistreatment of prisoners is going to lead to you representing or seeking to free unsavory people on the basis of their mistreatment (rather than their innocence).
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most
of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that
oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at
the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.Again though, my knowledge is short on the subject, but the Mencken quote felt an appropriate addenda to the video you linked, from a variety of ways. Remember that even if CAGE organizers are sympathetic to the goals of those they defend, once they've defended them, they're still defending civil rights.
>> Remember that even if CAGE organizers are sympathetic to the goals of those they defend, once they've defended them, they're still defending civil rights.
While this is a valid point in general, it is not in this context of showing schedule 7 to be overreaching. If the man in the article works for the CAGE and they actually are known as sympathetic to the goals of terrorists it makes perfect sense to detain him after he returns from a 'work' trip as there are likely valid, evidence based suspicions for it.
Besides if he wasn't innocent then there would be a crime that he could be charged for and/or a warrant produced to search his devices.
If so I don't see how compelling someone to hand over a password is any different than searching their home, asking them to open a safe, etc.
judicial oversight.
And that would made you unemployable, subject to arrest, etc.
Political and legal issues don't get solved with technical workarounds (unless they can force the law to change -- which I guess would count as a legal change, not a technical workaround).
Besides, flying less from an island is tricky for some.
[0]: http://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html#part3 (See 'Back to Part 3: Brain-Machine Interfaces')
It would, at a minimum, require brain surgery and probes. But that's unlikely to be possible without damaging the person.
You have nothing to worry about - ever.
Maybe if they froze, and then took apart a person, atom by atom, and uploaded everything to a simulator.
Never talk to the police. Doesn't matter what they say, never, ever talk to the police, about anything, for any reason. Talk to your lawyer. The police are not on your side.
At that stage it should be affordable enough to hire a lawyer to deal with it.
"CAGE, formerly Cageprisoners Ltd, is a London-based advocacy organisation which aims to "empower communities impacted by the War on Terror" and "highlight and campaign against state policies pertaining to the War on Terror".[2][3] The organisation was formed to raise awareness of the plight of the detainees held at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere as a result of the War on Terror and has worked closely with former detainees held by the United States and campaigns on behalf of current detainees held without trial.[2][4][5]"
The block looks like this: https://dohanews.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/qatar-block.p...
couldn't you unlock, and change the password to "changeme" for them.
I suggest using https://www.passwordcard.org/en and telling them where the passwords stop and start and make a new card once they release you.
This is in the UK.