UK police can force you to reveal encryption keys: first target is an animal rights activist

[thewayne]

Can't trust them terrorist animal rights activists!

On October 1, a law went into effect in the UK that if the police ask for your encryption keys and you don't provide them, you can face five years in prison. (story) Well, it looks like the first person to be charged with such is an animal rights activist whose laptop was seized in May. (story) So six months later, they're just now claiming that she has encrypted files? Pretty slow processing, good thing it wasn't a terrorist who wasn't going to blow things up in June.

The woman has provided some good quotes: "Funny thing is PGP and I never got on together I confess that I am far too dense for such a complex (well to me anyway) programme. Therefore in a so-called democracy I am being threatened with prison simply because I cannot access encrypted files on my computer."

She argues that even if she had used encryption she'd be disinclined to hand over her pass phrase. "The police are my enemy, I know that they have given information about me to Huntingdon Life Sciences (as well as hospitalising me)," she writes. "Would I really want them to see and then pass around private communications with my solicitors which could be used against me at a later date in the civil courts, medical records, embarrassing poetry which was never meant to be read by anyone else, soppy love letters or indeed personal financial transactions?"

Lovely ol' world, eh?

Comments

[silveradept]

If it's good crypto, or something like PGP, is it even possible for the user to be able to reveal the appropriate passphrase when demanded?

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

The concept is that if you encrypted it, then you should be able to provide the phrase to unlock the volume. Otherwise, unless there's an engineered back door, it's unlikely to be recoverable.

There's a concept that I'll bet a lot of people will be investigating of hidden volumes WITHIN an encrypted volume. Basically you can surrender one set of keys, and whatever authority can see your banking transactions, whatever: fairly innocent yet private stuff, but there's a volume hidden within the encrypted volume that requires an additional key to unlock. As long as they can't readily find the second volume, you're good.

[silveradept]

And if you've forgotten your phrase because you haven't encrypted anything in years, then I guess you're spending 2-5 years in prison for a faulty memory.

The encrypted within encrypted does sound interesting, but I would think it would be easier (and harder) to hide as much of it as possible in plain sight after the first crypto layer, or not even needing a crypto layer.