Note that a court could cite you for contempt for not complying with a subpoena duces tecum (a subpoena requiring you to produce objects or documents) if you fail to turn over subpoenaed backups.
Assume that your application is running (mirrored) on five machines in five different jurisdictions and the machines will lock out one or more of their number if they receive a panic code, or one goes offline unexpectedly, or is not accessed in exactly the right way, you could easily respond to a subpoena duces tecum by stating truthfully that the requested records are not (or are no longer) under your control. The machines themselves can also be protected by careful choice of location and judicious use of remailers and requirements that they only be accessed by telenetting, etc. Besides what's the big deal about contempt of court. If you are worried about doing 2 years or less, locate yourself in another jurisdiction. No need to expose your body to high risk legal regimes. Duncan Frissell "But your Honor, I'm desperately trying to *conceal* my contempt for this court."
Duncan Frissell writes:
Note that a court could cite you for contempt for not complying with a subpoena duces tecum (a subpoena requiring you to produce objects or documents) if you fail to turn over subpoenaed backups.
Assume that your application is running (mirrored) on five machines ...
I think that Mr. Frissell's suggestion falls into the category of what I've humbly termed "digital flash paper" mechanisms. In the days of yore, numbers runners and gangsters and nefarious bad guys would keep records on cellulose (?) flash paper which could be ignited and destroyed very rapidly should Elliot Ness be seen approaching the front door. Another (simpler) suggestion made by a friend was to devise motion-sensitive devices which would cause total corruption of information stored on a disk if it were moved. My highly esteemed legal opinion is that this could be considered criminal obstruction of justice, though as with the contempt of court issue such a charge might be preferrable to one of Sedition :-) -- Mike McNally
I wouldn't want to encourage anyone to contempt of court, but, strictly hypothetically, there is a very simple way to answer the request to hand over keys to encrypted data. Simply assure that you have a copy of the encrypted data available, then construct one-time-pad data of the same length as the encrypted data, such that when the two are XORed, you get your choice of plaintext. Hand over the "one time pad." This argues powerfully that one might want such one time pads available and in use even if you are really using a more convenient encryption technology. Kids: don't do this at home.
participants (3)
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Duncan Frissell -
m5＠vail.tivoli.com -
Tom Knight