s/forget passphrase for/cause permanent destruction of/ , Re: Letwin wants increased penalties for refusal to decrypt

[Matthew Byng-Maddick]

On Tue, Aug 20, 2002 at 01:01:46PM +0100, Owen Lewis wrote:
> But your 'right' to privacy is conditional and not absolute. Put your
> letters in steel boxes if you like; the law can demand that you open them
> and produce for examination your letters too.

Given you think this, what do you think happens if you put letters in a
safe with an anti-tamper device which will let off the equivalent of a
small firework inside the metal if triggered. Now let's also suppose that
by doing some part of the openning sequence in the wrong order, you can
trigger it, without doing damage to the locking mechanism.

So they force me to open it, and in opening it, I make sure all the data is
destroyed. What then?

In what way is this different from the situation where they can't get at it
at all, and how do they know I don't have another such safe elsewhere?

Your argument seems to require the Law to be omniscient. It isn't and cannot
be. I think you also ought to read Nicholas Bohm's answer to you, which
explains that you do *not* have to cooperate in a search, merely that you
are not allowed to hinder the search. These two things are very different.

MBM

-- 
Matthew Byng-Maddick         <mbm@colondot.net>           http://colondot.net/