Comment by brymaster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brymaster | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of a link I found while browsing Woz's tweets several months ago. https://twitter.com/stevewoz/status/364464427736633344

It was a video about a possible attempted 'setup' of someone named Luke Rudkowski who runs an investigative/dissenter/truthseeker blog.

Someone claiming to be a whistleblower had emailed Rudkowski's personal account from an anonymous Tor address supposedly having information that might interest him but attached were graphic images of CP. He was overseas at the time so if he had happened to get detained in customs while reentering the US and had his browser cache searched he'd be in some serious shit. Apparently he'd been detained in the past and had his computer searched.

A nefarious organization could use this method and tip off customs or local law enforcement to discredit a 'radicalizer.' Very scary stuff.

This reminds me of the German, so called "State Trojan", a Trojan used by the German domestic state police to search targets computers, that has the capabilities to alter the and upload to the targets computer in a way, that the messing with this computer cannot (in reasonable time) be found in court.

So the police could plant evidence, it then uses. This was the reason our supreme court forbid the usage of these tools, as contra to our constitution.

Non the less, the police and right-wing politicians lobby very hard for the use of these tools.

They just added to the list of legal defenses that can protect "bothersome" people [0]. We basically now have evidence that can be used to claim reasonable doubt whenever a bothersome person is in court defending themselves. Since the state is likely to rely on state secrets laws to prevent this information from being subpoenaed in a trial, the possibility that the state used this tactic against a bothersome person can no longer be ruled out and that should constitute reasonable doubt.

It would be supremely ironic if all these NSA surveillance shenanigans resulted in a broad invalidation of any digital evidence in a court of law when bothersome people are involved.

[0] http://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html

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