Animal rights activist hit with RIPA key decrypt demand

An animal rights activist has been ordered to hand over her encryption keys to the authorities. Section Three of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) came into force at the start in October 2007, seven years after the original legislation passed through parliament. Intended primarily to deal with terror suspects, …

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't be surprised...

I've had some exposure to "technical capabilities" of various agencies. (US, not UK, but they recruit the same type of people.)

I wouldn't be surprised if they are looking at the WIN386.SWP, or maybe some files in the recycle bin. (If you don't use the recycle bin to look at them, they have apparently garbage names. It's done so you don't accidentally 'find' a deleted file with a search.) Then again, it could be some leftover temp files or something.

I remember several years ago when an agent was in a local office supply store to get printing samples from the various printers. He was rather freaked when I pointed out that most of the inks and toners were made by only a couple of companies, and the fonts they printed were software based and could not be used like the old typefaces of typewriters for identification.

As to whether I agree with this ladies actions and affiliations. From what little I've read, probably not. It still doesn't change the fact that she has rights and should be treated fairly. The ends Never justify the means. If those tasked with upholding the law break or otherwise corrupt it, they should be dealt with immediately and harshly.

(Now if our own justice department would recognize that and deal with the out of control hedge on penn. ave in DC... Along with shotgun-dick.)

[Name]

Domesticated Primates are rather lame...

"Let's be perfectly asinine and senseless, people who value the life of animals above that of humans are scum. "

Since when are humans not animals? Is there any meaning to your sentence? We are domesticated primates, and nothing more!

I think we should start calling animals humans, and humans, animals, to avoid further confusion, and to shake-up our robotic minds. This is also my thought for changing the dynamic of the race issue. I'm known to say, "This white friend of mine..." (which is something that you don't ever hear from 'white' domesticated primates, whereas even the most so-called 'open-minded', 'white' humanoid-person can be heard to say, "I have this black friend who...". It also helps to refer to myself as a 'black' person, though my skin tone is closer to white than black.

Animal rights protesters promote the idea that all animals deserve rights - non-humanoid animals included!

These groups provide a voice for this cause, for people who have no voice, which is a fairly noble, if sappy, cause. The central idea is probably something like "animals who exhibit personality should be considered persons." My feeling is that I meet many non-humanoid animals who demonstrate more personality than some/many people I've met. In the same way, most humanoid animals I meet are as irritating and inept as most non-humanoid animals I meet. Actually, the percentage of non-domesticated-primate-animals I meet who are kick-ass in proportion to their capacities is higher than the inverse.

As far as the actual case is concerned, the suit against her sounds preposterous, though I imagine that she probably knows full well how to decipher the files.

[Anonymous Coward]

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

I'm pretty sure that's the key they're looking for.

[Anonymous Coward]

@ Giles Jones

Parkinson's isn't self inflicted, you cretin, and neither are most cancers. You can get either without ever having smoked, imbibed alcohol or eaten red meat and having exercised every day for your whole life. And the same goes, for that matter, for a whole plethora of other debilitating or life-threatening diseases and conditions - for which we wouldn't have the cures if they hadn't been tested on animals.

Scientists don't do it for a laugh, you know.

[heystoopid]

so

Section 29 Magna Carta reads:-

XXIX. NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right.

Has now been repealed thus by this law !

Oh well the twin islands of the long white cloud where the fierce painted local males wearing grass skirts have such a strange greeting custom is now looking like a very inviting place to live as it has no relative strategic value or large resources worth stealing from either ! :(

[REMF]

While i don't like the law

I hope the law completely bury's that woman and all her loathsome conspiritors.

If she never leaves jail i won't weep.

[Anonymous Coward]

Lock the stinking tree huggers up

If you had seen the motley crew that protested through Huntingdon town centre on Saturday, you would want them all locked up regardless.

People from out of the area come into MY home town, create more litter and mess than is created in 6 months in the town centre and car parks, are unwashed and stink, have the gaul to abuse the residents of the town because of the name of a research facility that is not even in the town anymore (10 miles outside of it in a village!) & generate a full scale police presence (that my flipping council tax will be raised next year to pay for!).

Stick all the tree huggers in the research labs and test the stuff on them.

If it wasn't for research carried out on animals in the HLS labs, 2 of my 4 kids would not be alive now & nothing else matters to me on the subject.

No doubt the encrypted data holds information on how to make car bombs and disrupt the innocent residents of Huntingdon.

These protesters don't give a crap about anything really. If you had seen the emissions coming out of some of their vehicles, you would have thought they had 40 Beagles smoking in the back of them.

[Anonymous Coward]

Conform !

Never forget that in the eyes of those that are more equal than others.........We are all guilty of anything and everything until proven innocent.

By becoming one of them we automatically become innocent. !!!

Please conform for your own well-being and safety.

[Mad Mike]

Human v Animal

For all of you who have forgotton, man IS an animal. Therefore, why should we not force humans to smoke cigarettes before being killed and cut up? What's the difference? Humans simply believe they are superior than OTHER animals and therefore give themselves special rights they deny the other animals. Is this in anyway logical? Of course not. Unless you put a religious slant on it, we are a product of nature and Darwinism. Natural selection and all that in the same way as every other animal. So, why should we be special?

P.S.

I like a nice bit of dead cow/pig/lamb etc. I eat a lot of meat. Nothing wrong with that, so do tigers etc. The difference is, I eat it because I have to eat, not because I want to do it for no reason. Therefore, in my view, researching on animals is justified where we are trying to stop something we haven't brought upon ourselves. However, when it is self-inflicted, we shouldn't. Therefore, if people want to research on curing smoking related cancers, they shouldn't as rather than fixing the disease, the answer is simply not to smoke and cause it in the first place!!

[peter]

Reporting

I thought there was a very serious jail term for anyone talking about RIP cases in the public, these are secret trials, I just hope The Register has a good lawyer.

[Daniel Voyce]

Christ thats pathetic

How many of us have encrypted something with a super long, super safe encryption key only to forget it?

I have a 4GB truecrypt file on my personal hard drive that has hoardes of data that I wanted to keep private, do you think I can remember the password to it?

No chance.

Would that mean id go to jail?

Steganography is the way forward people :)

[Mr Chris]

@mad mike

"Therefore, if people want to research on curing smoking related cancers, they shouldn't as rather than fixing the disease, the answer is simply not to smoke and cause it in the first place!!"

Yes, that's of great help to all the people with lung cancer that they developed due to starting smoking in the 50s, 60s and 70s when even doctors were telling you it was healthy.

And what about lung cancer caused by second hand smoke? Or other airborne toxins unrelated to cigarettes? "Smoking related cancers" are the same as certain non-smoking-related lung and throat cancers.

Don't be so simplistic.

[Anonymous Coward]

Escrowed keys

Someone suggested that this law is an incentive to develop legitimate encryption protocols that store the keys with a trusted excrow agency so that, given warrants/court orders/other legal compulsion, the trusty officers of the Law can access encrypted files.

All well and good if you can find the mythical "trusted escrow agency" which, given the current regimes' willingness to legislate to decrease the amount of oversight needed to obtain previously confidential data, becomes less likely with time, not more.

And apart from that, the offense is "refusing to disclose the information/key" depending on the Section: you would still be vulnerable to prosecution if some Trojan/Worm/Virus/Content provider had dropped encrypted data on your drive without your notice. There will always be non-escrow encryption packages, because of the untrustability of the escrow agency, used for nefarious and innocent (but criminalised because of the use of an unapproved encryption regime) purposes, and the authorities will point at these and accuse you of having used those. How do you prove you didn't?

It wouldn't be quite so scary if any judge in this country (I actually still pretty much trust the judges) had the technical nouse to be able to say: "The prosecution has to prove that the file was knowingly encrypted by the defendant, because there are any number of means by which a file that looks encrypted could have been deposited on the equipment where the files in question have been discovered."

The burden of proof in criminal cases is heavy and rests upon the prosecution's shoulders. The RIPA provisions for key recovery will only be any use in opening files from sub-competent conspirators/actors. Any organisation which thinks about its infosecurity will be proof against prosecution under its terms.

So obviously this legislation exists only to harrass petty criminals and the innocent but inconvenient.

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome...

Welcome to City 17. It's safer here.

[Anonymous Coward]

Down with animal rights terrorists

I don't really believe anything an animal rights terrorist has to say, so I don't believe that she doesn't have the PGP keys to decrypt the excel files listing the names and addresses of all the people they have attacked or are planning to attack over the next few months who work at animal testing labs.

Personally (other than the odd mp3) I don't have anything on my PC, in the millions of files that have built up on my hard drives over the years, that would incriminate me, so I dont actually have any doccuments encrypted, but if I did, and the police were requesting access, then I would grant access to them to prove my innocence.

The company I work for (which has nothing to do with animal testing) was once contacted by another company who do animal testing, and asked to tender for some work (we provide business services.) Almost immediatly the death threat answerphone messages started on us (even though we have nothing to do with animal testing at all) .... so we quickly decided to have no contact with the testing company again...... loosing us business and money. These people really are sick wierdo's who need locking up.

Anon post as some of you know what these animal terrorists are capable of

[Anonymous Coward]

The trouble with RIPA

Let's say you hear about this neat application called PGP and want to try it out. You download and install it, try encrypting and decrypting a few random files - neat. Only you forget to delete the encrypted files afterwards.

A year or two later, the police seize your PC, find the encrypted files, and use RIPA to demand you hand over the keys. Of course, you forgot them shortly after you created the encrypted files, which you'd forgotten were there in the first place.

[kissingthecarpet]

This says it all

When the Nazis came for the communists,

I remained silent;

I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,

I remained silent;

I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,

I did not speak out;

I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,

I remained silent;

I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me,

there was no one left to speak out

[Flajann Marcus]

How about a random series of bits

If I have a purely random series of bits in a file, it would be indistinguishable from a encrypted file. Would that mean I would go to jail for not producing a "key" for something that has no keys?

[Seth]

@ Conform et al

ditto pal.

Except I invoke "Mob Rule"

- I propose that "Anonymous Coward" is a terrorist and an Animal Activist so we should vilify him/her/it from now until eternity. Who's with me?

PS RIPA makes both a sysadmin and a security professionals role very uncertain. always remember to document and log everything you do through your helldesk system or you could be held responsible for unauthorised access of personel/private information or downloading illegal content.

[Mark]

In case you think I'm sympathetic

to an animal rights activist, I'm one of the founder members of the Vegetable Liberation Army. Our remit is to show people how horrendous our treatment of the vegetable kingdom is and how the animal kingdom can

a) run away

b) fight back

c) look cute

d) look too disgusting to eat

whereas the humble carrot has to just lay there and take it while you

a) pull it out by the "hair"

b) Skin alive

c) slice

d) boil

e) eat

while you are unable to hear the vegetative screams.

Save the carrot! Eat a vegetarian (e.g. cow)!

But RIPA is still a crap law and any exercise must and should be taken that will kill this law dead.

[Anonymous Coward]

More point-missing.

"I would grant access to them to prove my innocence."

The point, that you're obviously missing, is that you shouldn't *have* to prove your innocence, the authorities should have to prove (beyond reasonable doubt in front of a jury of people like you) that you are guilty.

This law will have a very poor ratio of [convicting the Guilty] to [harrassing the innocent] (where "harrassing" could be as serious as wrongfully serving years of jail time), unless our judges (and defense lawyers I suppose; it's their job to obtain the services of persuasive expert witnesses) are on the top of their very limited technical game.

[Spleen]

Sometimes being right isn't enough

Those saying that civil liberties should apply to all, otherwise they apply to no-one, are of course entirely correct. In principle. In principle, being on fire is a very painful way to die, and pain and death are bad. Nonetheless, I would not piss on an antihumanist if I found them burning in the street.

Somehow this one little moral inconsistency I hold doesn't keep me awake at night.

[Anonymous Coward]

For the truecrypt crowd

Ok... you have a truecrypt volume within a truecrypt volume on your hard drive. Deniability right? Ha! Nobody can PROVE that I am using it! Get out of that, plod!

Ok.. so the plod uses another part of RIPA and pulls your web logs, and we see something along the lines of:

1195127932.213 - a.b.c.d http://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-GB%3Aofficial&channel=s&hl=en&q=truecrypt&btnG=Google+Search GET 22048

...

1195127942.459 421 a.b.c.d TCP_MISS/302 404 POST http://www.truecrypt.org/download.php - DIRECT/72.36.226.2 text/html

...

1195127953.507 11023 a.b.c.d TCP_MISS/200 1567639 GET http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads/transient/556f51e92a/truecrypt-4.3a.zip - DIRECT/72.36.226.2 application/octet-stream

...

1195128954.314 - a.b.c.d http://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-GB%3Aofficial&channel=s&hl=en&q=how+to+hide+a+truecrypt+volume+in+a+truecrypt+volume&btnG=Google+Search GET 22048

...and also a lot of posts on various forums that have been accessed by your IP bragging about how you have this wonderfully secure and deniable encryption system in place.

I think that might be enough to raise reasonable suspicion about that 'random data' on your drive, and for keys to be demanded.

You want to know what someone is thinking, look to see what they ask Google for.

[Ash]

@Anon. Coward, Re: For the truecrypt crowd

You've missed the point.

Plod ask for the key to your "hidden" volume, you say it's "apogf784tb784tg" or whatever, they go "Oh, looks like that's not the key!", you go "I don't have a hidden volume."

Repeat ad nauseum.

(You could argue that by refusing to provide the key to *A* hidden volume (which you may or may not have; deniability, again), you're breaching RIPA again. Doubt it would stick, though.)

[Pum]

Search warrant comparison

it seems to me that accessing encrypted data by "the authorities" is conceptually akin to searching your home, for which they usually need a warrant. People don't seem to be all up in arms about search warrants, so perhaps that is an acceptable model that should be used in cases such as this - ie: "the authorities" have to convince a judge that they have due cause to look at the encrypted data, and get a warrant. This would be better than just having the power to demand access to any encrypted data they come across during an investigation.

However, they probably obtained the computer in question under the auspices of a search warrant, and so one could argue that that warrant implicitly grants them the right to the encryption keys. After all, if they have a warrant to search your house, and find a locked cupboard, they have the right under that warrant to ask you to open it, or force entry themselves. With modern encryption, forced entry is not an option.

Of course search warrant procedures are not perfect (nothing is), but an interesting point of view on this, no?

[A J Stiles]

The problem is

The underlying problem is one with which philosophers have been wrestling since the dawn of time: two wrongs don't make a right.

Experimenting on animals is wrong. Committing violence against HLS staff, even though they experiment on animals, is wrong. And demanding encryption keys, even from people who might have information pertaining to violent acts which were wrong in spite of being committed against animal-experimenters, is wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

RIPA is pointless

Whomever designed this idiotic law is woefully short-sighted. Many encryption products, TrueCrypt being one of them, support plausible deniability for just this reason.

> Create a TrueCrypt partition. Put some secret but harmless files in there - bank statements, passwords, that kind of thing.

> Create another TrueCrypt volume hidden at the end of the outer partition. This volume is designed to start from the opposite end of the volume. Because TrueCrypt encrypts unused spaces with a random seed, the volume is impossible to distinguish from unused space on the outer volume.

> For added secuirty, use something like BartPE to create an OS that you can boot from a USB key. Make sure you only ever unlock the hidden volume after booting from this, so you don't leave any forensic traces in your main OS.

> RIPA request? Certainly officer. Here's the passphrase to my TC volume. Plausible Deniability? Never heard of it...

Why the hell did they bother? It's not going to have the slightest effect on anyone who knows how to keep their stuff really hidden.

[Anonymous Coward]

Manufactured evidence

So, now the police don't even need to plant any physical evidence, beat out a confession or rely on fake witness reports to set someone up! The police take your computer, upload some encrypted rubbish and - hey presto - instant convicted 'terrorist'.

Even worse, remember the recent cash for questions inquiry? What would have happened if an anti-Labour activist had uploaded encrypted files called 'TBs list of Labour donors and honours' onto someone's PC?

The difference between encrypted files and physical locks is that there isn't a physical lock that can't be broken. If you don't have the key for a lock-up registered in your name, the police can either get a copy or break in. That way they can find out whether the lock-up is being used by you or not. With encrypted files this is not the case,and so there is no way for you to prove that the file is not yours.

[Aquilus]

@Pum

A more accurate analogy would be plod getting a warrant and raiding your home, and not finding anything incriminating except an empty bedroom. Then demanding you tell him the magic word that would make that invisible stash of lovely incriminating evidence stored there appear. And locking you up for two years for failing to do so, because you must be lieing when you claim "There's nothing in there! It's just an empty room, honest!" How on earth are you supposed to prove you don't know something?

[Mad Mike]

@Mr Chris

'Yes, that's of great help to all the people with lung cancer that they developed due to starting smoking in the 50s, 60s and 70s when even doctors were telling you it was healthy.

And what about lung cancer caused by second hand smoke? Or other airborne toxins unrelated to cigarettes? "Smoking related cancers" are the same as certain non-smoking-related lung and throat cancers.

Don't be so simplistic.'

I wasn't trying to be simplistic. I know there's a lot of grey areas. I was simply making a general point that we shouldn't use animals to fix something we bring upon ourselves. As to the 50s, 60s and 70s and what doctors were saying. If anybody seriously believes breathing in large amounts of smoke deliberately is ever going to have anything but a bad effect on their health, they deserve everything they get. I don't care what doctors say. I have never smoked for the simple reason that logic says it is unnecessary and more likely to be harmful than not. Therefore, don't do it. That's not to say I support the Nazi anti-smoking laws now enacted in this country. Personally, I would let people do anything obviously stupid at their risk. I simply wouldn't try curing it.

If someone wants to die doing something stupid, that's their choice. Bring back more Darwin I say.

[I.M.Fantom]

Title

How about if I add some encrypted files to the software packages I download and install? If every manufacture did that, the police would have a lot to do.

[Michael Sheils]

Animal Rights People

Just to be clear I hate this law, but I am so glad it is being put to good use dealing with these nutjobs. lock her in a cage and run some tests.

[Law]

stupid freaks

Come on.... shes an animals rights terrorist... lock her up for that, not for the files! :)

I hope while they are playing this "give us ur keys" game they are running a brute-force attack to guess the password... she's not that bright, I doubt her password is anything more complicated than "fluffy bunnies"...

[Martin Beckett]

Thats why colossus has been restarted

In other news, WWII code cracking computer Colossus has been restarted http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7094881.stm

Apparently they got a demand to hand over the plain text of any encrypted messages they had been storing.

[Charlie]

@charles platt

"For those in the UK, the Fifth Amendment protects Americans from being forced to incriminate themselves. The state is supposed to find evidence to build a case, not force people to dig themselves a legal hole.

Too bad Britain doesn't have a written constitution, eh?"

The fact that we don't have a written constitution doesn't mean that we don't have protection roughly equivalent to the 5th Amendment. Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights enshrines the right to a fair trial, and case-law has specifically indicated that the right to silence/not to incriminate yourself are important aspects of this right.

I haven't followed the details of the RIP act, but it would seem prima facie that this would be a strong ground to challenge any convictions for failing to provide encryption keys.

[fsfdfgfg]

Criminal excuse of a law

Hi,

My system is ready for inspection day and night. The entire drive is encrypted. If state sends me to jail for being unable to crack it, I shall happily serve my time wasting taxpayer's money.

Two years should permit me to plan a fairly effective retribution, which will target politicians and law enforcement with a level of violence proportional to their violence against me.

I'm not joking. If state crosses me, I will accept its challenge. I don't want to, but backing down would be unethical.

[Michael]

I don't like titles.

It'd be fun to make a text file with random characters in it, name it "jihadist_operatives.pgp" call in an anonymous tip about yourself, then slap the police around when they try to order you to give them the key for a file that's not actually encrypted. If you waste enough government resources making them chase this crap down, they'll see the law is ridiculous.

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes my blood boil...

When idiots trot out the "if you've nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" argument. What a ridiculous statement. I am not a drug smuggler and therefore have nothing to hide at the airport but I think the intrusion of having my body cavities searched every time I pass through the airport would be something to fear. But if I were to object, out comes the old "well if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear argument". Of course innocent people can have something to fear when a law is bad. Mistakes can be made, or do you think the police are all perfect and infallible? Laws created in haste for one purpose can be misused to the detriment of the innocent as well as the guilty. For goodness sake come up with something more intelligent than "if you have nothing to hide.."

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely this would cover people?....

----

(3) For the purposes of this section a person shall be taken to have shown that he was not in possession of a key to protected information at a particular time if—

(a) sufficient evidence of that fact is adduced to raise an issue with respect to it; and

(b) the contrary is not proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

----

So if they can't prove you knew it, your safe surely? Put's paid to the theory of uploading files to other peoples computers.... with any luck....

http://www.opsi.gov.uk/Acts/acts2000/ukpga_20000023_en_8

Section 53, Sub Section 3, Paragraph B

[Taskis]

@ Anonymous Coward

<< Mistakes can be made, or do you think the police are all perfect and infallible? Laws created in haste for one purpose can be misused to the detriment of the innocent as well as the guilty. >>

Certainly the police aren't perfect and infallible. Some of them are incompetent; some are corrupt. Most, though, are just men and women trying to do a job that they still just about believe is worth doing, even though the population for whom they're trying to do it increasingly seem to think otherwise. But what the police *don't* do is make law. They merely enforce it, as they're sworn to do. That's not to say that at high levels they don't have an influence - but bodies like ACPO are still a world away from the standard street copper, who generally has less political weight than Mr or Ms Average-Citizen.

Those who genuinely believe that the police are all deeply involved in some great Orwellian conspiracy might do well to peruse some of the numerous UK police blogs out there. Perhaps they'll show you that many of the police are just as frustrated by (and even worried about) new laws like this one, and that there'd be more than one copper breathing a sigh of relief - for just the same reasons as any of us - if this law *were* to be overturned.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with those of you who are pro-vivisection

Is that you've probably never in your lives been anywhere near a lab!

[Anonymous Coward]

5th Amendment

This law goes against the 5th amendment. "nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself". Don't give them the key and take it to the supreme court.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish people would read properly

You quoted my << Mistakes can be made, or do you think the police are all perfect and infallible? Laws created in haste for one purpose can be misused to the detriment of the innocent as well as the guilty. >>

and then went on to imply I was saying the police are all "out to get us". If you read the whole of my comment again rather than a selected part, I am pointing out that it is a bad law that can be abused whether by design or accident. The police are paid to uphold the law and I support them whole heartedly in that difficult task. However, I am against laws that are plain wrong and counterproductive, as I am sure would be most of the police. If this woman is a terrorist (and I don't know if she is, any more than any of you do) just look at the public platform she has been given to air her unpalatable views because of the application of this law.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good choice of scrote

I suppose this is how unpalatable precedents are set--choose someone so despicable and universally despised that nobody cares what means are used to prosecute them. Only snag is, those means can then us used against the rest of us...

[Anonymous Coward]

New law for new technology

It is only because there is new technology that anyone is getting upset about this law. Unless you believe that everyone should be entitled to conceal information from the police with impunity we need a law like this. Otherwise evidence cannot be obtained except at excessive cost (perhaps needing a lot of time and a super computer to decrypt) or at all.

The risk of encrypted files being planted and then an innocent person framed is of a similar order to the risk of other evidence being planted. It exists. Yes, care will have to be taken because it is easier to plant a file than physical evidence. However, in this case, the animal rights woman rather gives the game away when she says: "Funny thing is PGP and I never got on together" implying she knows all about PGP and has used it in the past.

If the police seek a search warrant to go through someone's papers the fact they might find correspondence with solicitors or embarrassing love letters would not be a sufficient reason to refuse the warrant. What is so special about keeping information on a hard disk?

[Anonymous Coward]

@ Anonymous Coward #4567

"So, now the police don't even need to plant any physical evidence, beat out a confession or rely on fake witness reports to set someone up! The police take your computer, upload some encrypted rubbish and - hey presto - instant convicted 'terrorist'."

Why?

If the police were actually trying to plant something on you to make you look like a terrorist why would they try and do so by putting a fake encrypted file on your hard drive, why would they not just stick a word doc on there titled "My plan to blow up some airport.doc" or why not just plant some good old fashioned drugs and explosive in their house

[Anonymous Coward]

If she doesn't provide the key...

... wouldn't she be obstructing the course of justice anyway, or something like that? Not sure of the penalty on that, but I suspect it's lesser?

Better uninstall WoW then... who knows what The Warden is doing...

Does sound a rather unsafe law - especially if it does get applied in the case of the key being unobtainable. In which case, would you need to try and hack your own files, should you have lost the key? (I know of numerous times people have forgotten passwords to things).

I really don't get these violent activists. Humans are animals too... and if you're harming animals (of any variety), isn't that completely defeating the point? Or would that logic cause a buffer overflow in their poor minds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't feel sorry for her...

If it was someone who belonged to organizations that didn't go around threatening the lives of people in 'my' industry and destroying our property then I might have some sympathy for her plight, but knowing what I know about the majority of these "peaceful (what a laugh) activists" I can't say I would be sorry to see one get smacked with the law.

[Sillyfellow]

guilty until proven innocent

it CRYSTAL CLEAR to me that this new law is intended to set a precedent whereby you will be GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT.

horray for the authorities getting what they want. total control of us all.