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Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. The site implicitly references the arrest of the Silk Road founder, using the alternative acronym "Department of Parks and Recreation". He was arrested by having his laptop literally yanked from under his fingertips in a public library.

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Having a USB kill switch in this case could (would?) have escalated the arrest method to something more violent.

How would a more violent arrest have solved anything?

Instead of moving the laptop you move the user. Unless the kill switch is connected to the user or you remove the user too slowly and allow them to manually trigger the kill switch, you may gain access to the laptop.

That's a very interesting proposition that looks completely insane to my European eyes, but I can certainly understand the philosophy behind it.

So the premise is that if using kill-switches becomes common among criminals, we can expect suspects in computer crime cases to be apprehended in ways such as unexpectedly being hit in the head with blunt force trauma, gassed with anesthesics or similar violence. Seems like it would challenge some pretty central democratic principles!

The kill switch is useless if the accused is incapacitated before they could trigger it.

No knock raids, which are inherently violent, to "preserve evidence" and reduce the risk to LEO happen about 20000 times a year in the US.

> No knock raids, which are inherently violent

> reduce the risk to LEO

I remember reading news about an american who killed an officer who entered without knocking. He was not convicted, it was ruled self-defense.

20,000 no knock raids and, I think, two cases of officers being killed.

It's probably better to be beat up or tortured by a state actor than to rot in prison for the rest of your life if they get hands on proof of your culpability.

Besides the USA is not Al Qaida, there is a chance they would respect the Geneva convention: https://ccrjustice.org/home/get-involved/tools-resources/fac...

What I'm saying is that they wouldn't get a chance to use the kill switch because they would have focused on "containing" the suspect before they could activate it.

In theory, I agree. But it is somewhat akin to saying - why use strong encryption since a three letter agency can just brute force your device. If you're in that deep, maybe it won't help. But for the average reporter in a hostile zone, keeping the local police from snooping on their machine would be preferential.

We actually agree completely. This thing may be useful, and certainly something to think about if you live or travel to places where electronic devices are often snatched and, like you said, prevents casual snooping since the local police WILL have to escalate to violence.

I just don't think it's going to prevent a Silk Road incident and could make it worse for the suspect.

I disagree. I this this sounds a little too much like a TV show like 24.

The idea that you could completely immobilize someone at a public library so rapidly and without their awareness that they could not even move their arm 20 cm or so during a struggle seems ludicrous to me. Particularly as the kind of person who would buy this device would be setting themselves up with their back to the wall to prevent captures from behind.

I am fairly strong and have wrestled and grappled for over a decade, and I would not put my faith in an operation that required me (even with another agent) to completely immobilize even a weak person enough that I could guarantee they could not trigger this.

This takes a flick of a finger to trigger, or moving your arm a small distance away from the laptop.

> The idea that you could completely immobilize someone at a public library so rapidly and without their awareness that they could not even move their arm 20 cm or so during a struggle seems ludicrous to me.

Well, they did — and without even touching him.

They didn't "completely immobilize" him, though, as apparently "Ulbricht stood up sharply"[0] after his laptop was seized. However, he did make the mistake of not sitting with his back to a wall, since the agents "walked up behind" him. I guess we'll never know how he would have reacted if they had instead walked up in front of him and tried to grab his arms.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/ross-ulbricht-will-be-senten...

I think you have way too much faith in the reasonableness of law enforcement. There are 20K no-knock raids in the US every year, a significant percentage at the wrong address or clearly innocent people.

Did you reply to the wrong comment?

This device is indeed clearly designed for a no-knock raid situation, or other surprise grab.

I'm simply saying that, if you're attached to your laptop by a 50cm cable, which of you separate your arm further than that from will lock your computer, it will be very difficult for the agents to guarantee you won't be able to lock your computer.

If your kill switch manages to destroy evidence, that's generally obvious and has two consequences.

First, intentionally hiding or destroying evidence of a crime is itself a crime (self-incrimination is restricted only to verbal statements) of which you can be convicted even if you're not guilty of the original accusation;

Second, destroying evidence in this manner enables the legal concept of 'adverse inference' where essentially the judge can require the jury to assume that the destroyed evidence did contain whatever prosecution wanted to find there, and convict you based on that.

Yep, I think so too, it wouldn't have protected him. Whoever was in charge of the operation would've noticed and identified this killswitch, and prepared appropriately. The suspect would be incapacitated as a matter of priority to prevent him from activating it.

Honestly, that sounds a little too "CSI". If the lanyard is attached to a wrist, the chance that someone could be suddenly incapacitated in such a way to avoid a jerky movement that breaks the connection is pretty small. "Knock them unconscious" is a TV trope.

What about "pin his hands to the table" while the nerds exfiltrate the data?

Maybe there needs to be an accompanying/alternative device which can be worn in a shoe and detects toe movements. It would probably have to be wireless, which would introduce false positives or false negatives, (and part of it may need to be attached to the user's ankle, due to size constraints), but it would at least defend against an attacker who could physically restrain the user.

OMG, did you just invent Agent Smart's Shoe Phone? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe_phone

How is that supposed to happen?

But if you even notice the (thin, dark?) bit of cord between a guy's wrist and laptop computer when he's working on it at a table in the library, wouldn't your first assumption be that he's a bit paranoid about having it stolen and therefore has strapped it to himself by the Kensington Lock slot? So you'd be quite OK with stretching it as far as it goes -- only noticing later that in this case you could "stretch" it beyond that, popping out the USB connector. (Actually, wouldn't a lot of people in a position to do this be only too happy to give it an extra forceful yank, just to hurt the Eevul Hacker?)

Why? Was he a violent criminal?

What does "violent criminal" have to do with it? The US (and other jurisdictions ) use extreme, violent arrest methods like no knock raids for all sorts of non violent offences.

I can definitely see policy to tase or otherwise subdue with less than lethal means being OK'ed by authorities and judiciaries. In principle you'd hope this was rigorously established beforehand on per case basis but that historically has not been held to standard long if they end up doing it with any frequency.

This is getting into the security question of what your threat model is. If you're seriously expecting a nation-state intelligence agency to be after your laptop, I'd really, really recommend not having anything on your laptop because unless you've got your own security team they're going to find some way to get it and will observe you to see if you're using something like a killswitch first.

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