Man convicted after preventing counter-terrorism police search

If you don't provide the means to decrypt.

Absurd nonetheless.

With very selective enforcement.

Almost everyone with an internet connected device possess encrypted data.

Welcome to <current year>, where more and more math is considered illegal.

Possessing random data is also a crime since it's indistinguishable from encrypted data, and if you can't provide the non-existent keys, your SOL.

In the UK, yes. Holding encrypted data against the wishes of the government, that is to say you are unwilling to decrypt it for them, is a crime. I believe up to two years in prison.

I would much rather the odd "outspoken jihadist" remains free than live under an oppressive police-state with no privacy rights. And that's exactly where we're headed.

My naive understanding of my country's laws is that it doesn't.

I could have a file filled with /dev/random and the law would still apply.

Back when the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill was being circulated, to much outcry from technical folk, someone encrypted a file with a provocative name and sent it to the Home Secretary for exactly that reason, as a form of demonstation-cum-protest.

Suddenly the Minister[0] possessed a file which he couldn't decrypt on demand. Would he consider amending the Bill to remove penalties for such eventualities? Of course not, nothing was changed.

If you possess the bytes you'll do the time. Delete everything that is unnecessary as soon as its usefulness has expired - big corps learned that lesson, for other reasons, in the early 2000s.

[0] well one of his staff

The point is that the law doesn't make any sense, and can be used to intimidate and imprison difficult people, at the Crown's discretion.

The idea is to create crimes that they can apply to anyone. Technically they apply to everyone, but they can then use selective enforcement based on criteria that the general public would never have openly tolerated as a law.

> How does this work with things like DRM? What if you have media on your phone from something like Spotify or Netflix that's presumably encrypted or protected in some way, that you cannot decrypt if your subscription expires...

Interesting point, but I think in this situation they'd be putting pressure on the media provider to decrypt it for them (since the media provider is the one in control of the encryption, not the consumer). That's assuming said media provider is in a jurisdiction that the relevant govt has some control over, and/or media provider is compliant.

Here's a thought experiment: suppose ISIS (or your preferred terrorist organisation of the day) set up a media service for users to share videos (or other media) that are protected by DRM. The media service can disable the viewing of said content on a whim. A person using this service has their phone/computer confiscated, but the authorities are powerless to gain access to the content due to the DRM. Is this person liable under these laws, even though the encryption is outside their control?

Imagine a malicious attack on a target where a cryptolocker is pushed to a victim, an anonymous tip is sent to the authority about the same person holding potential documents related to terrorism, and the attacker just throw away the key.

How can you even defend yourself?

>It isn't supposed to make sense. it's suppose to reinforce the "you do whatever the police ask you or face the consequences." Apparently the law backs them...

I meant "make sense" as a deterrent for next occasion AND useful for counter-terrorism.

If you are "innocent" and refuse to give away your passwords, you now know that you have serious chances to be punished in a non-trivial way.(losing your electronic device + fine + 12 months conditional)

If you are "guilty" (of terrorism or contiguity with it) you now know that you can refuse to give away your password, effectively preventing the police to read your data and maybe in one year time you will get a slap on the wrist (when compared to the punishments for actual being part of a terrorist plot).

So, "real" terrorists will surely continue not giving away their passwords to the Police, whilst most innocent people will be giving them - fearing the punishment[1].

The net effect will be that Police will have not access to relevant terrorism related material but it will lose a lot of time on analyzing gigabytes of - say - lolcat videos.

[1] a few innocent people will anyway refuse to give away the passwords for this or that principle, so among the "non-answering" will be both innocent and possibly guilty people, so it doesn't even work as a "screening" method.

If it is a foregone conclusion that they have the file, then they already have enough evidence to prosecute the individual, since possession of the file is the crime, compared to the tax file where the contents may be evidence of a crime, but is itself not a crime to possess.

That's no longer true. The Patriot Act enables government behavior that's functionally equivalent to this incident in the U.K.

Further evidence that the ideas behind the American Revolution and the Anti-Federalists were important then, and now...

It is a search and seizure issue. But note that the man was stopped in Heathrow airport. In the UK, as in the US and most other countries, you have to submit to searches as a precondition for air travel. It is firmly established that the government can require you to give up certain rights as a precondition of entrance to certain places. Like going through airport security, or having to go through a metal detector before entering a courthouse, etc. Which isn't to say that what happened here is not or could not be an illegal search in the US. It isn't necessarily a constitutional issue, there are/can be laws limiting what law enforcement can do.

Actually this is a case for 5th amendment. Police can confiscate your phone on a judge's order, but no judge can compel you to give up your password if it's protected under 5th amendment (i.e. self-incrimination).

In Europe, free speech is understood in a somewhat more narrow context than in the USA.

There are explicit exemptions for national security, etc. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_10_of_the_European_Con...

How would you trigger a remote wipe?

If you could get to it quick enough that is. I assume police departments these days have a procedure for cutting off wireless access to devices they confiscate by using radio frequency blocking bags. This of course brings up an interesting counter for actual terrorists, devices which don't fully power down and monitor for radio frequencies so if they are lost, the device automatically wipes itself.

It's the police's own news site. So yeah, the contents are coloured at best :-)

Do you think the censorship of Mein Kampf, the anti-hate speech laws, and the illegality of Holocaust denial in some parts of Europe have authoritarian motives?

Be careful with using private entities to mail your stuff. Yes, it's encrypted, but they also don't need a warrant to open the package. USPS does. Obviously for international shipping this is going to change based on the country of departure/origin, but something to keep in mind if you actually have a need to be concerned with this type of thing.

I would not bet against the fact that those two accounts are linked being known to border patrol / law enforcement.

It’s the greatest question, and i often ponder it. I believe the answer is different incentives. The specifics are much harder.

nothing, but at least you can try to fight it in court

At the moment? Momentum of the general belief that, in fact, the Constitution worked .. for a while. It is only Americas belief in itself which perpetuates the mythos that Americans had rights (in the not-too-distant past) that most of the rest of the world, explicitly did not have...

Whereas, the British (and the Australians, who have one of the most embarrassing 'constitutions' of them all) seem to have been fine, all along, to just roll over and expose themselves to their masters, the ruling classes.

Nevertheless, these constitutions are nothing more than smart contracts. I'm wondering if anyone has done the UDHR as a smart contract .. seems that might be the right thing to ICO.

You've phrased your response in a way that seems to prevent falsification, but I'll give it a shot anyway.

For example-- the Trump administration's initial travel ban executive order was blocked by the courts based directly on issues of consitutionality. Furthermore, if you read the text of that bill you can tell the authors were careful not to use the frank, unambiguous language that Trump used on the campaign trail as that would have been thrown out by the courts even more quickly.

So there you have it-- an example where the current administration did the opposite of ignoring the U.S. constitution, and a court system that blocked the executive order even though the administration tried to skirt the intent of the constitution (namely, the 1st amendment). Does this falsify your statement? If you don't think so, please give me an example of what you think would falsify it and I'll give that a shot.

The 3rd and 4th boxes of liberty. As a reminder, the four boxes are: 1. Soap 2. Ballot 3. Jury 4. Ammo

If the first two aren't working, you take to the jury box, and when people are unjustly charged with crimes that are either misapplied laws or simply that which people deem to be unjust laws, they can find a defendant not guilty on any grounds they wish in the US. That's one of the more critical aspects of the courtroom that often goes overlooked. Jury nullification is rarely talked about but it's a crucial power of the people. Judges and law enforcement hate it because society can effectively nullify anything by refusal to return guilty verdicts. So even if someone is clearly guilty under the wording of a law but the jury determines it to be an unfair law or a law applied unfairly, they can find them not guilty. However, the reverse is not true. Guilty verdicts must be returned in accordance with the wording of the law and historical precedent, in conjunction with the guidance the judge provides.

In cases like this, though, things are more difficult because it's not just the charges that are levied, it's the entire way the government is conducting itself. That is much more difficult to solve is 1 and 2 don't work and why the 4th box is supposed to be used under only the most dire of circumstances.

Of course, I don't think the government is entirely to blame. People keep voting these scumbags back into office for some reason so apparently there are people out there who approve of what their representatives are doing. And yet, amazingly, everyone seems displeased at the results. It's fascinating, really. It's like everyone has this mentality of, "all these congresspeople are lying dirtbags...except for mine."

You make it sound as if the UK has a constitution which is codified in some patchwork of documents, like statute law.

But it isn't; it isn't even as coherently defined as something like the common law of murder, where you can make a pile of statutes and legal precedents and get a fairly clear idea of where the boundaries are.

The constitution is very fuzzy indeed, and parts of it depend very much on how much political and media support someone can get when they point a finger and declare "unconstitutional!".

The UK doesn't have a constitution in a sense that US does - i.e. supreme law that checks powers of all branches of government - because the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty allows the Parliament to override any constitutional limitations, simply by fiat. Worse yet, this only requires a simple majority.

TrueCrypt is long dead and uh, like may never have actually done what it said it did and was probably stolen technology to begin with.

Let's not mention it again.