[145967] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
English 19-year-old jailed for refusal to disclose decryption key
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ray Dillinger)
Wed Oct 6 15:31:42 2010
From: Ray Dillinger <bear@sonic.net>
To: Cryptography <cryptography@metzdowd.com>
Date: Wed, 06 Oct 2010 11:57:26 -0700
a 19-year-old just got a 16-month jail sentence for his refusal to
disclose the password that would have allowed investigators to see
what was on his hard drive.
I suppose that, if the authorities could not read his stuff
without the key, it may mean that the software he was using may
have had no links weaker than the encryption itself -- and that
is extraordinarily unusual - an encouraging sign of progress in
the field, if of mixed value in the current case.
Really serious data recovery tools can get data that's been
erased and overwritten several times (secure deletion being quite
unexpectedly difficult), so if it's ever been in your filesystem
unencrypted, it's usually available to well-funded investigators
without recourse to the key. I find it astonishing that they
would actually need his key to get it.
Rampant speculation: do you suppose he was using a solid-state
drive instead of a magnetic-media hard disk?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-11479831
Bear
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo@metzdowd.com
