Re: subpoenas of personal papers

[Chris Knight <cknight@crl.com>]

On Mon, 24 Jan 1994, Bob Torres wrote:

> Just thought that I'd throw in my somewhat unrelated $.02...
> 
>         Here at Penn State University, a hacker/crakcer/whatever was caught
> on one of our mainframes back in 89 or 90 and he had some files encrypted
> with DES on his minidisk.  The authorities asked him for the passphrase and
> told him that if he refused that they'd crack it with a Cray in something
> like six hours.  He ultimately gave in but I wonder if it would have been
> legal for the authorities to brute force a passphrase on the file...this is
> relatively unbroken legal ground.  
>         Of course, this is DES which was made weak enough to be breakable. 
> PGP is a much different story.  

  I'm going to look at this in the light of past cases with reporters:  
When a judge demanded the names of informants/sources, and reporters 
declined, they got slapped with Contempt of Court charges.

  This rarely happens anymore, since reporters get some defense from the 
Bill of Rights.  But for us, in these days of cutting edge legal battles, 
we could come out on the bottom.  Had that student refused his key, they 
could have probably charged him with CofP, and kept that charge in place 
even after they had broken the key.

  "It's better not to get caught than to frustrate the feds with evidence 
they don't understand."  

-ck