Personal computers
Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy discusses the utility of personal computer seizures versus network surveillance as a law enforcement tool.
Personal computer searches will maintain their critical importance in computer crime cases for two very practical reasons. First, no matter how much people store information remotely as a general matter, they tend to keep evidence of crime and digital contraband close to home. Second, it is quite difficult for the government to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt based solely on evidence obtained from a network. You never know who had acccess to the network, or when, or whether the account was hacked or stolen. As a result, nearly every computer crime case ends with a retrieval and search of the suspect's personal computer(s). Finding evidence of the crime on the suspect's personal computer is damning evidence, quite persuasive to a jury. As a result, even if lots of the action happens at the network surveillance level, most investigations still end up with a personal computer search.
Commentary
This controversy goes to the very heart of the notion of what constitutes a persons computer. Mr. Kerr might be right when he says that most people keep "digital contraband" close to home, but I suspect that for a growing number of people, their information stores are scattered over physical computing resources whose actual location they have no idea of. Consider a person who has one or more web e-mail accounts. That person's computer effectively uses a remote mail server as data storage. Consider this blog. The majority of a person's intellectual property may actually be stored on a remote server owned by the Google corporation.
In the extreme case, consider a person whose operates exclusively from coin-operated Internet machines or Internet cafes to transact his business. It's perfectly possible to do this, provided one is willing to take the risk that passwords may be captured by spyware on the client machine. Where is his computer? But on the other hand, if the network is to be considered a virtual computer, all kinds of Fourth Amendment problems associated with a "vacuum cleaner" approach to surveillance will be encountered.
posted by wretchardthecat at 2/26/2006 08:54:00 AM
29 Comments:
We all use aliases when interacting with another. Be it through a digital network or through one-to-one personal contact, one can never be sure who one is really dealing with. But one can certainly eliminate unwanted aliases.
Btw,
That's what Holocaust Denial Laws are all about. (Yes Doug, HDL cholesterol is the good kind).
I AM THAT I AM
AM I THAT AM I
"the good kind"
...promoted by good beer.
---
"In the extreme case, consider a person whose operates exclusively from coin-operated Internet machines or Internet cafes to transact his business. It's perfectly possible to do this, provided one is willing to take the risk that passwords may be captured by spyware on the client machine. Where is his computer?"
---
What about a computer w/no hard drive?
If data was kept in Ram rather than Flash, couldn't one just turn off the computer after use and be clean?
Tony, or anyone,
re Google Desktop Search:
I indexed my hard drive, and images and web pages all seem to be accessible, but old rtf and doc files are not found unless freshly saved.
What's up with that?
...promoted by good beer.
Let's put the Klan on campus. Hiding behind the guise of academia, doesn't mean the message is academic.
Very good point Ed. That's where warez is heading. Actually that's where it's at already. Encrypt, put a false file extension, rename, and upload to a temporary storage solution.
Is it possible that people that listen to that kind of music might get the message, since all other coherent thought has already been filtered out?
Ed,
With a small Flash Drive, one could keep it on his person at all times w/a little battery powered electromagnetic mass eraser!
Kind of like the panic button in a bank.
Mika,
Is "HDL" the Hamas Defense League?
You call that good?
Well here's an interested conundrum. The concern for proof is that anything "on a network" is likely to be held in doubt by a jury. But if the person's "own computer" is also "on a network," then why would that be any less doubtful?
I suspect juries are confounding notions of personal property -- "it's on 'his' computer" -- with questions of access. Determinations about "what is known about the limits and range of who could have accessed something" are what they are, regardless of ownership or even possession.
Frankly, I'd be more worried about physical access. There's a point at which notions of proof have to acknowledge common sense. If I'm prosecuting a two-bit pornographer, there are ways of defeating network security which would require genuine conspiracies among many vendors. How likely is that, in this, or that, instance?
It all boils down to reasonable doubt, and the rub just there is "reason." Some juries are insane.
Doug: You call that good?
I'll wait to the day of the Sabbath to decide. In the mean time, I'm flushing out the memory on my iPod nano.
I knew who you were all along, but I never guessed the price was two-bits.
That bytes.
Cryptainer is a program I've been VERY happy with.
Cryptainer
I can make easy to use password protected vaults, up to several GIGS in size, on my laptop HDD. Windows treats the file as if it is a removable drive. I can easily back up on DVD if needed.
Why would anybody think that information he leaves on Google's servers is private? Check the ads they feed you on the right side of the screen. Its not private. If you want to keep something private, don't store it on Google. Is that too difficult to deal with?
If you want to keep something secret, the first thing you must do is to not tell anybody.
Look
There's a Spider
Or so it seems
Incessantly weaving
Such gossamer schemes
As should make one wonder
What blueprint within
Instinctively causes
The spider to spin
Spiders do
What they do
In spidery nets
Intrinsic insiders
Who cover all bets
With polymer silver
They gossamer spin
Wait, wait, wait
For dinner
It soon may drop in
At the Pentagon we used removable hard drives in order to enable us to lock up the computer data at night in a safe. The drives had everything in the computer, including the operating system, in order to make sure that all data was locked up.
Have not seen a computer set up that way since I left the 5 Sided Ft Fumble, but I am sure you could still get one like that if desired. On one hand you could take it with you and secure it in some way - on the other, if caught with it you would have little or no plausible deniability.
The other thing we worried about was TEMPEST - the ability to read emissions from a computer. To prevent such RF leaks, the computers were built as if they were WWII battleship radio sets. Turns out they found it was not as easy to read computers in the building as they had feared, - being next to an airport helped a lot - but no doubt the standard commercial PCs today are veritable broadcast stations that could be picked up by surveillance equipment. I assume that would be illegal with a court order, just like wiretapping - but since you are broadcasting with your PC, maybe not.
Mika, very good poem.
Many people do not know that ticks are a type of spider that feed on warm blooded creatures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick
Once engorged, the nymph drops off its host into the leaf litter and molts into an adult. These adults actively seek new hosts....
Sounds like Pan Islam?
Arthur,
I loosely transcribed it from audio. The author is Ken Nordine. Cont..
Look
How lovely
The glint of the sun
Is gracing with highlight
The web being span
Dear God
Of all Spiders
Please
Hear this small prayer
Is Spidery Heaven
One infinite snare
Will there be gravity
So food will fall by
Have you ever tasted
A goo bottled Fly
Never had Scorpion
Do they have a God
Ticks you might fancy
But the flavor is odd
I wonder if Spiders
Would like eating Mite
Those juicy small Monsters
That louse up the night
Spider might like mites
And get used to the taste
Spiders will do what they must
It's the spidery way
Ed,
I'm not a software engineer, but wouldn't the extra (encrypted) bytes be easy to separate from the legitimate content?
Ed,
Sorry for the misunderstanding. I was just commenting on what is already happening in the warez world. Encrypt, put a false file extension on, rename, and upload to some temporary storage like RapidShare, where files are kept for 30 days and then erased.
For web anonymity you can use an onion routing network.
Of course, the best way to safeguard yourself from the Feds, is to enroll in a Terrorism course at Yale University. Like this guy.
The best policies are to have no secrets. With government prerogative in the control of networks, the people you’d hope to keep your secrets from are the first ones to have a peek at your activities. This whole NSA spying case is a load of sh!t. They can drill into any thing that peeks their interest. In recent years, identity theft has become the most prolific crime. On the internet, someone can commit crimes in your name. It is easy to get an anonymous account and run it through a proxy server. But one can never be quite sure who might be skulking around your data. PGP can do wonders to change that. In the end, it is hard to know what information is secure and what has been compromised.
And you just know, that fellow Doug is a Fed. Always tries to put you in a compromised position. He and his coconut dancers.
I can't imagine there is anything more sensitive on my computer or thumb drives than my tax return, which information the Feds already have, so that's basically already in the public arena.
If the Feds want to read my genealogy database, or look at my family's photographs, well.... knock yourself out!
I first posted this on 25th Feb 2006 in a couple of blogsites and I maintain the declaaration of Emergency Rule was unjustified.
The State of Emergency apparently was declared on the basis of a foiled coup d'état.
If that's the case, then Palace spin that they foiled a coup d'état was preposterous and technically wrong! In military legal parlance, the act or acts by by BGen Danilo Lim does not fall under the military crime of coup d'état, least of all by government spin of COUP D'TAT FOILED!
By tradition, a coup d'état is the violent overthrow of the government launched by the military but which could be aided and abetted by civilian components of the Republic. To say that they foiled a coup d'etat means that a VIOLENT overthrow had been initiated by the military or a component of the military.
Contrary to Palace spin and innuendoes, BGen Danilo Lim, when he approached CSAFP Senga to persuade him to withdraw his support was technically espousing mutiny and not a coup d'état in the same manner when Gloria and her husband had persuaded Gen Angie Reyes to commit mutiny by withdrawing their support for the Erap government.
That the mutiny might have later on generated into a coup d'état is another matter but at the time Lim was arrested, technically, the act being committed by Lim was inciting to mutiny and not a coup d'état.
Palace spin therefor that they FOILED A COUP D'ETAT is absolute nonsense! There was no physical evidence that Lim had launched a violent assault on Gloria's government so, how could they foil something that had not even started?
That there may be grounds to believe that a coup d'état might have been launched by Lim remains to be seen - Gloria's government and her spin masters have to prove that Lim had sequestered military logistics and ammos for the purpose of a violent overthrow. Until then, the only real case here is that Gloria overreacted because a general had tried to incite his superior to commit mutiny.
Now on a real coup d'état board: Oakwood was a FOILED coup d'état. It had all the elements of a planned violent overthrow of the Republic, yet they were only charged with mutiny.
Incidentally, two of the most well-known proponents of a coup d'état was Gloria and her husband when they encouraged and gave firm backing to a military general to launch the violent overthrow of the Erap government.
It was Gloria's favorite general BGen Espinoza, former Marines chief and the supplier of the infamous Marines' helmets (that got Admiral Wong, former FOIC later into trouble with the Marines for denouncing the Espinoza helmets) who would have led a violent coup d'état against Erap had Angie Reyes not been able to persuade Major Service Commaders to agree to withdraw support.
(This is going to be a little technical so skip it if that does not interest you.) There are two area of networks, public and private (i.e. Phone networks and the internet). You can't really be called spying if you are on the internet since it is an open network and you must think of traffic the same as a postcard viewable by everybody. There are limited internet connections in and out of the country (Mae-east & Mae-west and in Europe mae-paris). I'm sure that Mae-east and Mae-west have a lot of exceptions in their routing tables for Mid East Ip address ranges going to some special sniffers. It is very easy to secure IP address using openVPN for instance and various proxy servers. What is not so easy to secure is where the traffic is going to and coming from which will be very interesting. There is nothing to stop a terrorist parking outside an open wireless internet router in somebodies home, or creating a zombie robot PC to proxy traffic both here and in Europe. What you get down to is net warfare. I'm sure the NSA is closely watch the habits of key terrorist who work on inter cell communications. I doubt if we are worried about a computer hard drive as much as identifying the source and target locations of key players.
The majority of spying we are talking about is taking place on the private networks AT&T, MCI etc. The NSA I guess has been data mining these the phone companies database to look for phone traffic patterns to specific regions and specific houses in the US. I heard on the news that they had 350,000 people world wide of interest. This is what they are talking when they are talking of spying. It is much more likely that all that complicated technology is outside the knowledge base of you average terrorist cell so they are forced to use the plain of telephones plus the addage loose lips sink ships. This is where I imagine most the the NSA's interest lies.
Cowgirl,
But if we simply persist in filing on paper, sorting us all out remains a non-trivial matter.
Why folks VOLUNTEER to provide the government a free computer ticket to search their lives, I'll never understand.
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