https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...ctronics.shtml

Well I guess I'm going to have to find a better way to hide my flash drives. I know dogs have a much better sense of smell than humans do, but I didn't think a flash drive or a hard drive really had a unique smell over other electronics.

Encrypting is a must.

The operative phrase is "could contain." It could contain the secret schematics to the Death Star, too.

... and the core problem here, of course, is that "child pornography" is merely a subterfuge. I need to strip-search you electronically at the airport just in case you might be carrying a thumb-drive, just in case it might be carrying (uhh... gotta make up something real-bad sounding here...) "child(!) pornography(!!)." Yeah, that's it. Booga-booga, now take off all your clothes and empty your suitcase. Give me all your data (that you're not spewing on the Internet so I can lap it up ...) "just in case" there might be (booga booga) "child porn" there. I want your data. Any pretense will do nicely.

That's an excellent way to get several hundred million dollars from the new US Government slush-pile: the "Homeland Security™ Industrial Complex."

But it won't make anyone any "safer." It simply continues to further erode whatever safety (sic ...) we may have. You see, it really doesn't matter if one of your national symbols talks about "yearning to breathe free," if what you are actually doing, for all the world to watch, is transforming yourself into an increasingly dangerous totalitarian state.

If "vague threats," about "ter'rists" or "child pornographers" or what-have-you, are sufficient to prompt the plebeians to accede to removal of protections about "unreasonable search" or "probable cause," then those freedoms will disappear. "Because there's plenty of money in it for me," if nothing else.

"... and I said nothing, because they did not come for me. Then, they came for me."

What I'm saying here is neither a "paranoid" concern, nor an "abstract" one. This is not something that will simply impact "someone else." If you say that you live in "a democracy," you have to pay attention to what's happening way up there in the wheelhouse.

"Terrorism" and "child porn" are by far the most common excuses given for such measures. I'm pretty sure they could do anything they want using these as excuses and people would be fine with that.

Two major issues I have with this are:
1) Cops aren't always trustworthy individuals:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...motorist.shtml
http://ktla.com/2014/04/23/sheriffs-...-l-a-pot-shop/
this will just give them one more reason to search you and your car without a warrant, and another chance to plant evidence.

2) As for encryption, it is mandatory for anything that might be stolen, but a court can force you to decrypt it:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...computer.shtml
I guess the best thing would be not to carry any electronics in your car, except for your cell phone.

The people who wrote the US Constitution and then its Bill of Rights may have been Enlightenment-era dreamers in some respects, but they did know the Dark Side of human nature as it is expressed as "state powers." They gave us a series of very terse sentences, including the Fourth Amendment. It would behoove us to remember that these words are vitally important to our (inter-)national security: that the only way to truly be "secure" is to cling to these principles more tightly, not to poke holes in them until all the security leaks out.

We've allowed ourselves to become "obsessively interested" in data. However, in doing so, we created(!) vulnerabilities that never existed before.

First, we put a spy-device in Everyman's pocket, so as to broadcast his every move.

Then, in the name of "security," we embarked on a program to vacuum-up every byte of data on the Internet, and to store it so that "top men" in the US Government could have access to it all.

Then, we became paranoid about the possibility that people could still move data around without us picking it up ... hence the new obsession with using police-dogs to sniff-out USB sticks that might contain "more data."

However, perversely, we are completely blinkers-blinded to other obvious things – such as the fact that anyone else, in the private sector, can (and does) collect the same data about Everyman, and that these "other" datasets are merrily being shipped to Bangladesh and to other "cheaper" places ... places not-too-far, really, from places that the US considers to be "bad places." Such as the fact that "cheaper people" are also being imported to be given access to the same, largely unprotected(!), treasure-troves.

(And this isn't a "racist rant." Data, especially of this nature, is or should be "profoundly secret." But you can't background-check people, or truly secure the "holistic" data-handling situations that you're dealing with, under these circumstances. These things are hugely-important. But they're not being seen as such ... yet.)

So ... we're self-blinded by our own institutional follies. Specifically, we're blinded by "NOBUS Disease" ( = "NObody But U.S," which as we ought to know can never actually be achieved.) The one thing that you're looking for is the one thing you can't see. Trillions of dollars of public money are being wasted, by people who really don't care about that waste because they are the ones receiving "Uncle Sugar's largess." ("You're insecure. So what. I'm rich.")

What we're supposed to be getting, for all that money, is "(Inter-)National Security." Perversely, we're doing the opposite. We're violating the basic best-practices of data security, and we're doing it on an international scale.

No, it's not encrypted, it's clearly blank.

Better yet, follow above steps with several blows with a heavy object, and maybe run it over with a semi a few times...

On a more serious note, it makes me tempted to set aside a 1GB partition, get a small (read: fast) kernel and initramfs in there, and have a script that puts "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=4k" in an infinite loop...

EDIT: or have 2 encrypted volumes. One is tiny, only a few megs, and the other is the actual stuff you want to encrypt. You know the key to the tiny one, and the only file inside the tiny volume is a really long string of random characters: the password to the second volume. Then all you have to do is get rid of the tiny volume, and you legitimately have no way of accessing the data.

Looks like they can't actually force you to hand over the keys.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_di...#United_States

Although if it was legitimately a matter of national security, they would probably threaten treason like they did with Lavabit.

Supposedly, but like the article I posted says, the courts keep arguing over it. Sometimes they rule one way, sometimes the other. Technically, the 2012 ruling should hold, because a higher court decided it, but I'm not a lawyer.

I'd say that, if the Court issues a search-warrant authorizing the police to "search for" a particular piece of evidence, then you, too have a legal obligation to comply. In other words, either to hand-over the keys or to personally enter it so that the officers can proceed with their duty to collect the information.

If you refuse, then you are (at best ...) in "contempt of Court."

However: unless the data actually does turn out to be child-porn, the data is still "yours," and this is what I most fear that we are losing. "Give me the data, or my dog will rip your arm off as he searches you bodily to find it. Then, once you give it to me, you'll never see it again." Lately, we seem to think that "nothing's private, and nothing should be private." And, this notion is desperately wrong.

On a lighter note, when I first saw this headline, I wondered how it related to the famous New Yorker cartoon: "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog", alluding, of course, to the then relative anonymity of the web.

How the times have changed, and so very rapidly. Now not only does everyone know you're a dog, the dogs are actually coming for you. Insert joke here about country going to the dogs.

Like a white crow, such instances are hard to document.

Actually, No. You have an obligation to turn over your laptop based on a search warrant, but not necessarily give them your password. If the police come with a warrant to search your house for something, you need not give them the key to the lock to your basement storage. You may be stupid not to, since they will -- legally -- take bolt cutters to the lock, and your non-co-operation will be noted at trial and at bond hearings, but a search warrant does not compel co-operation, only acquiescence to the search.

Freakin baby boomers were asleep at the wheel of this country. They created this mess, now someone else has to clean it up.

Of course they were the are the original me generation it's going to take a couple generations to erase the damage done by them but they don't much care because they got theirs.

Yeah, I'd say "you'd be stupid not to."

Anyhow, the take-away from this story really is that, in some law-enforcement circles, "Data is suspect." We have made the stuff far too easy to get to, and, far too easy to accumulate, such that what we now have is "data hoarding." Trouble is, when you have that, you also have a hoarde, and that becomes a prize unto itself. A prize that is probably sitting out there, relatively unprotected. One "bad apple" on the staff of such an agency, who doesn't earn enough salary to be particularly noticeable, could do a terrible amount of damage by exploiting a mass of data that is meant to "protect."