Judge orders defendant to decrypt PGP-protected laptop

[Perry E. Metzger]

Adam Fields <cryptography23094893 at aquick.org> writes:
>> Well, it should be clear that any such scheme necessarily will produce
>> encrypted partitions with less storage capacity than one with only one
>> set of cleartext. You can't magically store 2N bytes in an N byte
>> drive -- something has to give. It should therefore be reasonably
>> obvious from partition sizes that there is something hidden.
>
> I don't see how you could tell the difference between a virtual 40GB
> encrypted padded partition and 2 virtual 20GB ones.

The judge doesn't "need" to know the difference to beyond any
doubt. If the judge thinks you're holding out, you go to jail for
contempt.

Geeks expect, far too frequently, that courts operate like Turing
machines, literally interpreting the laws and accepting the slightest
legal "hack" unconditionally without human consideration of the impact
of the interpretation. This is not remotely the case.

I'll repeat: the law is not like a computer program. Courts operate on
reasonableness standards and such, not on literal interpretation of
the law. If it is obvious to you and me that a disk has multiple
encrypted views, then you can't expect that a court will not be able
to understand this and take appropriate action, like putting you in a
cage.


Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry at piermont.com

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