Man imprisoned for not giving police password.

He obviously has some pretty dubious stuff on there to be fair. What 19 year old encrypts their stuff with a 50 character password and refuses to give it to the police until hes imprisoned otherwise?
 
Tefal said:
except of course "reasonable cause" now includes "any activity not in Britons economic interests".
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Like I have said, I'm far from convinced that our current 'reasonable cause' ideas are right, or indeed that all our criminal laws are right. However, that doesn't change the fact that the position around encryption can be a reasonable restriction, and isn't totalitarian or draconian at present in itself (although can be used with laws that are excessive or draconian, such as the extreme pornography law).
 
Dolph said:
Not if you can prove you've lost the key and any means to obtain another one.

Is it ok for the police to arrest you if they know you have the key somewhere but refuse to hand it over?
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How do you prove a negative?

If they know you've got the physical key somewhere, they can just go and get it. This is where the analogy ends - back to the real world, the police should be able to arrest you if they can prove you know what the key is and are refusing to cooperate. I'd suggest that proof of that isn't that easy to obtain.
 
Dolph said:
Laws mandating the handing over of passwords are no different to laws permitting warranted searches (which you can also be jailed for obstructing).

As long as there is reasonable grounds to request the password in the first place, I have no problem with this part of the law, and can't really see why anyone else would either.
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Self incrimination, right to silence.
 
edscdk said:
cost him 20k had to move out of the area, spent months in and out of court, lost his job, and the papers published he was a pedo..
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Oh my days, imagine the stress. Can i ask, do you know if your mate sued the paper for defamation of character?., was he given compensation of any sorts?.
 
growse said:
How do you prove a negative?

If they know you've got the physical key somewhere, they can just go and get it. This is where the analogy ends - back to the real world, the police should be able to arrest you if they can prove you know what the key is and are refusing to cooperate. I'd suggest that proof of that isn't that easy to obtain.
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Then the next logical step is to restrict access to strong encryption, or to mandate backdoors...

Penalities for refusal to hand over keys are about the most liberal of acceptable solutions to the problems posed by easily available mass encryption...
 
sniffy said:
Another issue is the generation of random characters in large volumes. Considering the key must be as long as the raw data itself this is far from trivial for data in high volumes.
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If you think about it one time pads make this law useless because they provide perfect plausible deniability as well as being impossible to break. All you need do is generate a fake one time pad by subtracting the ciphertext from an innocent hard drive image, when the police are given the fake pad the hard drive decrypts to innocent data and there is no mathematical way to prove the pad is fake.
 
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Strife212 said:
He obviously has some pretty dubious stuff on there to be fair. What 19 year old encrypts their stuff with a 50 character password and refuses to give it to the police until hes imprisoned otherwise?
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To be fair he could have pictures of his 17 year old girlfriend in there to be fair. And to be fair they could send him away for 10 years for having pictures of his girlfriend to be fair.
 
Rainmaker said:
The lad does sound like he has something to hide, but only insofar as he's gone to jail for failing to provide a password rather than cooperate with a child sex offences investigation. At 19, for all we know he's just got a ton of pirated material locked up and he's too **** scared to let the police know about it. Maybe his youthful mentality convinced him that 16 weeks in clink for failing to provide a password is better than "omg a million years inside" for having a few pirated movies.

I'm not saying it's true, or even likely(?), but with anti-piracy advertising being the way it is you couldn't really blame him for thinking 16 weeks was the easy option. Maybe he just didn't think through the ramifications vis a vis the child protection side (i.e. he's a de-facto paedophile for not cooperating)?

Or, maybe he really is a dirty child molester. We'll probably never know. This law still sucks though. If you know he's up to no good, great - prove it. Just don't send someone to jail for having a private life.
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He could technically have "child" porn on there, "child" porn that most people people probably wouldn't bat an eyelid at (as such).

Could have been rodgering his 16/17 year old GF (even a couple of years ago) and got a video of it, or just loads of photos from her. If I had that on my computer (and I bet that is very common in the teen age group...) I'd be **** scared of the consequences, even though there is not really (morally) anything wrong with it.

Just playing devils advocate here, could be a load of other reasons, or he could have 50GB of proper child porn...:(
 
Energize said:
If you think about it one time pads make this law useless because they provide perfect plausible deniability as well as being impossible to break. All you need do is generate a fake one time pad by subtracting the ciphertext from an innocent hard drive image, when the police are given the fake pad the hard drive decrypts to innocent data and there is no mathematical way to prove the pad is fake.
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That's a very interesting thought. I imagine if it is feasible then it has been explored in a military environment. The idea that a captured spy can hand over a fake key which does generate legible text within some meaningful context but ultimately incorrect information could be pretty powerful.
 
gambitt said:
To be fair he could have pictures of his 17 year old girlfriend in there to be fair. And to be fair they could send him away for 10 years for having pictures of his girlfriend to be fair.
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It's not some random guy they picked off the streets, they were investigating him for sex offences in the first place.
 
Strife212 said:
It's not some random guy they picked off the streets, they were investigating him for sex offences in the first place.
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Could you provide more details please?

I was arrested and "investigated" because someone incorrectly (and anonymously!) pointed the finger at me. It's very easy to get someone arrested. If someone did that to you would you hold the same view?
 
Richie said:
It nearly happened to that teacher whereby a colleague planted abuse images on his PC and then called the cops. The only reason he got caught and the innocent man let free was because the guilty party told a couple of people what he did and they told the police. If he had not said anything then a totally innocent man would be in prison and branded a monster.
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Not true. The police suspected something was up and were able to prove it. See here.

That's the thing that gets me about this. People have the right to a defence. You explain what happened and 12 good men and true decide if you're guilty. It's the way it's always happened and unfortunately it's always been open to miscarriages of justice. Computer-based evidence is probably less prone to it than most evidence as both sides get exactly the same data to draw their conclusions from.
 
Dolph said:
Then the next logical step is to restrict access to strong encryption, or to mandate backdoors...
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Why? Why not do the freedom thing of letting people do as they please ... and then trying to employ superior technology to get access, if the technology is not good enough then tough.


I find it odd, you always advocate freedoms in your posts, a position I agree with, but then you draw the line on encryption.
I view it as a game, whoever is better at it wins, so if police are better they get the stuff to put you away, if you are better then they don't
 
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Strife212 said:
Well he could have cleared his name by giving them the password for a start.
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And what if the pictures were of him getting rogered by a bloke called Big Al? Maybe he'd prefer to go to prison for a few weeks rather than his parents and the media finding that out. Like has been said above, could be pics of his 17 year old girlfriend (or boyfriend) from 2 years ago and despite that being seemingly "innocent" the prosecution will take what they can get and convict him anyway.
 
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