[145994] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: English 19-year-old jailed for refusal to disclose decryption
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Samuel Weiler)
Fri Oct 8 11:20:21 2010
Date: Fri, 8 Oct 2010 11:03:32 -0400 (EDT)
From: Samuel Weiler <weiler@watson.org>
To: Cryptography <cryptography@metzdowd.com>
On Thu, 7 Oct 2010, Nicolas Williams wrote:
> If decryption results in plaintext much shorter than the ciphertext -much
> shorter than can be explained by the presence of a MAC- then it'd be fair to
> assume that you're pulling this "trick".
Not to argue with your overall point re: crypto not protecting citizens from
their states, but I disagree with the above in the case of truecrypt, which is
what was being discussed.
I have many unencrypted drives (or partitions) that are only partially
full. It's quite plausible that an encrypted drive would not be very
full. ("I thought I might need more space later." or "well, I had all
of this space...")
> Moreover, possession of software that can do "double encryption" could be
> considered probable cause that your files are likely to be encrypted with it.
There's a lot of software I use daily which has features I never touch. I use
the alpine MUA, but I never have it fetch mail from a POP server, I don't use
message scroing, etc. Maybe the suspect selected truecrypt because it works on
all of linux, MacOS and Windows, unlike so many other such tools. And is free,
unlike BestCrypt. There are many plausible reasons for selecting that tool
that have nothing to do with the double encryption feature.
-- Sam
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