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Comment by Veedrac | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand what's being defended here. The guy already admitted what's on the computer. Like, the EFF saying

> "We store a wealth of deeply personal information on our electronic devices. The government simply should not put individuals in the no-win situation of choosing between disclosing a password—and turning over everything on these devices—or instead defying a court order to do so."

This is deeply baffling to me as applied to this case. The personal information being ‘protected’ is not his property.

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Yeah, this is an extreme case. I mean, he reportedly said:

> It’s 64 characters and why would I give that to you. We both know what’s on there. It’s only going to hurt me. No fucking way I’m going to give it to you.

It seems like a totally dumbass thing to say. The standard advice is politely declining to answer, and requesting an attorney.

But at least he didn't lie.

And yes, it's true that the content isn't likely his, in the sense that he generated it or that it's about him. But it would -- as he admitted -- incriminate him. And the court affirmed that he has the right to not incriminate himself.

What's especially interesting is that the court didn't agree that "We both know what’s on there." didn't moot protection against self-incrimination.

I bet he did lie and its not 64 characters. He was probably saying that to make them not try to break his password12345.

But they haven't broken it. And I assume, not by failing to try.

Worse still is the threat of quantum computers that will make cracking his vault trivial. Apparently in 20-30 years people will be able to fit a quantum computer into a laptop form factor and break certain types of crypto at will, regardless of the keysize or key complexity.

At the moment, quantum computers have only been shown to give exponential speedups over classical computers on problems that can reduced to the special case of the hidden subgroup problem for finite abelian groups [1]. This is only really an issue for public key crypto at the moment (RSA, Diffie-Hellman, and ECC) since secret-key crypto tends to need less structure in the underlying problem. The best you could do to speed up cracking AES with modern quantum algorithms would probably be Grover's algorithm, which only gives a quadratic speedup (an O(N) search becomes O(sqrt(N)) instead). [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_subgroup_problem

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover%27s_algorithm

> quantum computers that will make cracking his vault trivial

Disk encryption tends to use something like AES. Key derivation is usually built on top of hash functions, but a 64-character password has more bits than most people use for AES, so key derivation might not matter.

The implications for AES aren't known yet, beyond effectively reducing the key length[1]. You're probably thinking about prime factoring and RSA, which will be weakened by quantum computing.

[1]: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/116596/will-qua...

well if that is true then it will mean that we will just be able to use the same quantum processing to make the encryption strong enough that it won't be able to be cracked for X million years or whatever.

you could argue that things encrypted today might be easily decrypted though

> But at least he didn't lie.

> We both know what’s on there

To be fair, they _could_ claim he's lying there, since neither of them know 100% "what's on there". There are certainly things on the disk that neither one of them are aware of. Sure, it's a technicality, but it's known that the authorities are perfectly happy to use such technicalities against suspects.

OK, sure.

But it's pretty clear that he meant child porn. I mean, he even shared some of his favorite themes.

The point, though, is that he didn't need to say any of that.

What's being protected is the contents of his head and only tangentially his computer.

If the computer required a physical key he would be forced to provide it.

> The personal information being ‘protected’ is not his property.

The information being protected isn’t the pictures. It’s everything else on the PC.

Though I guess in this case it’s about providing information in his head?

And in the case of the pictures, what if you manage to memorize the hex codes of the pictures and just retype them if the computer data is lost? That is difficult, but some people might do such things.

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