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Comment by speeq | Hacker News Reader

"At approximately 1:30p.m. eDT on August 2, 2013, Mr. Levison gave the FBI a printout of what he represented to be the encryption keys needed to operate the penregister. This printout, in what appears to be 4-point type, consists of 11 pages of largely illegible characters.

Moreover, each of the five encryption keys contains 512 individual characters - or a total of 2560 characters. To make use of these keys, the FBI would have to manually input all 2560 characters, and one incorrect keystroke in this laborious process would render the FBI collection system incapable of collecting decrypted data."

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> To make use of these keys, the FBI would have to manually input all 2560 characters...

My reaction to that was "oh boo hoo".

When people my age were kids (get off my lawn) we used to type pages of raw hexadecimal from the back of magazines into a machine prompt. We didn't cry about it, we were just careful.

I can't find a hexadecimal example at the moment, but look at some of these TRS-80 programs (pp. 110-111, 143) which have multiple pages of data/digits to transcribe:

http://archive.org/stream/80-programs-for-the-trs-80-1979jim...

Btw, the originals were often bad photocopies. So maybe not 4 point font, but certainly ambiguity in some bits.

And also... C64 programs. They were manually typed in by 10 year old kids. The programs were printed in the computer magazines (early 80s) that dealt specifically with C64's. These programs were far more than 2560 characters (in some cases).

If young, interested kids can do it, I'd hope that a nation state could figure it out.

Link: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a5/ComputesGazett...

Yep, I did that when I was a teenager -- entered the machine code for an entire word processor for the C64 called SpeedScript. The good old days ;-)

Yep, I remember doing that with an Apple II back in '79 to get a simple lunar lander game. The process took more than a day, with two friends to help double check the values as we copied everything over. When it ran, and worked, we thought we were gods!

Although to be fair, Compute! magazine at least had a checksum calculator to help you make sure you entered each line properly.

> My reaction to that was "oh boo hoo".

Yeah, in the grand scheme of things it's easier to get a few people to type that in (it's parallelizable, after all) than to wait for another court order. Though I'd still have brought it to the judge's attention as this is like the dictionary definition of "contempt of court". If someone tried to be GPL-compliant in this fashion they'd be laughed off the mailing list.

Keep reading: a couple of days later, he was then forced to send them in digital format under penalty of $5000 per day after the new deadline. So yeah, contempt was clearly detected, if not explicitly mentioned... your justice system works very quickly when it wants to.

Oh, I knew had presented it to the attention of the court, I was agreeing with their course of action in that regard bringing it to the judge's attention. A couple of days later is still too long of a wait though.

Creative Computing magazine once published the entire source code for the game Adventure [1] ... on one page. (I still have that issue.)

[1] Great stuff at the time; precursor to Zork.

I remember them having checksums to ensure line integrity.

Even cooler would have been Lavabit scanning and photocopying the 2650-character printouts on Xerox machines :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156238

hahaha. Thanks for making me smile this morning :)

Should have given the next lot with 1 char per page in a huge font (so it's legible), but then "accidentally" drop it and change the order of pages.

As funny as that might be, there is such a thing as contempt of court which I guess he'd find less so.

I think any reasonable person already has contempt for our current US courts.

its only contempt when its directed at the powers that be!

Sure, it'd be hilarious. Until the court says "You didn't do what you were ordered to. Either do it, or be fined".

Take the piss to much with the wrong judge and its jail time.

4 people can get this data entry done in an hour. One person reads out loud while the other person types and confirms each character. The second team does exactly the same work enabling a diff on the completed work to quickly find errors once everything is done. One character per second isn't unreasonable, so that's less than an hour. Or the same team does it twice in 2 hours.

I suspect the real reason it was done was so a few "typos" could be slipped in and blamed on the poor copy. A few 1's and 7's swapped would do it.

Speak it out loud to Siri!

You get three people to independently input the codes and take a vote on the characters (or inspect the disagreements)

Voilà, information is transported reliably over a noisey medium! error correcting codes in practice 101

EDIT: voilà typo fixed :p

It's "voilà", not "viola". Both of them are French words, but the latter means "raped" (probably not what you meant).

And all this time I thought I thought a viola was something like a violin.

Now you see the violence inherent in our musical system!

And not enough sax?

Viola actually doesn't mean anything by itself. The noun is Viol, the verb violer and only in the simple past 3rd person does it become viola.

Since I guess this is the place for pedantry, viola is the third person singular passé simple of violer.

Rapped actually doesn't mean anything by itself. The noun is Rape, the verb rape and only in the simple 3rd person does it become rapped.

(Well, not "only", but I guess you can see my point.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viola

> To make use of these keys, the FBI would have to manually input all 2560 characters

They would probably have to OCR the thing.

Nope. Ladar intentionally used an obscure font (some variant of Helvetica with extremely narrow kerning) to make OCR difficult.

Obviously it would be possible to apply OCR, but it would take a few days/weeks to train the algorithm. An out of the box solution would not work.

What are interns for ?

Or are they "non-essential" employees ?

those are sequestered now.

If they're unpaid, does that still count?

2560 characters isn't that many. You'd have to proofread the OCR'd version anyway, I'd say it'd be easier to just type it in.

Should have printed it out as images via ReCaptcha

It's not a big deal though. They subsequently specifically asked him to put it on a CD in PEM format and deliver it by 5 that day or be faced $5000 fine per day or something like that.

...put it on a CD...

There should be a standard virus-laden ISO image specifically designed for "compliance" with court orders.

Does it really help? I'm assuming they'd be running SELinux. Autoplay isn't going to really help when they've specified the format as well.

If you gave them a rar, tar.gz, zip or anything, the Man can hold you for contempt if he really wants to.

Preferably modified Stuxnet. They'd get the taste of their own medicine.

I don't get it. 2560 characters in 4pt should fit in far less than 11 pages…

Single sided, double-spaced, abstract, appendices, title page, dedication page, headers, footers... still doesn't seem to be enough. Maybe the numbers were in Roman numerals?

Maybe he printed it out using only zeros and ones?

They were to turn over the keys and all information required to decrypt everything. Presumably, they wrote a LOT of 4pt boilerplate on how to use the keys for decryption.

> To make use of these keys, the FBI would have to manually input...

Has the FBI never heard of OCR, or were these printed as CAPTCHAs?

Presumably they could quite easily OCR it.

It's in the court documents. They did OCR it, to present as an exhibit. It was illegible, they also stated that the original was nearly as illegible.

Well, with a 4pt font, accuracy would probably suffer greatly.

have you never seen CSI? They just need to press the "enhance" button, stupid.

Oh, sorry, I forgot the FBI has that technology. Silly me.

OCR? Nearly impossible.

OCR only works decent in combination with a dictionary.

Or with a limited alphabet.

azAZ09+=/?

I would have kept sending printouts with ever so slightly larger fonts (i.e. 10 steps from 4 point to 5 points.)

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