Judge orders defendant to decrypt PGP-protected laptop

[Steven M. Bellovin]

On Tue, 03 Mar 2009 13:53:50 -0500
"Perry E. Metzger" <perry at piermont.com> wrote:

> 
> 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.
> 
Indeed.  Let me point folks at
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/paul/being-acquitted-versus-being-searched-yanal
-- which was in fact written by a real lawyer, a former prosecutor who
is now a law professor.

		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb

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