From: Justin Lister <ruf@osiris.cs.uow.edu.au>
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 94 12:08:31 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: LITTLE BROTHER INSIDE
Message-ID: <199407261902.AA14756@osiris.cs.uow.edu.au>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> C'punks,

> On Tue, 26 Jul 1994, Jim choate wrote:

> > . . .
> > This would of course assume that the police were silly enough to
> > use the disk and such from your machine in your machine. From my 
> > experience w/ Mentor and Erik Blookaxe during Operation Sun Devil this
> > is not very realistic....Also it would only work
> > once. Thereafter they would either examine the equipment in a Farady Cage
> > or else start doing pager rental scans prior to seizure.

Why not just use an encrypted partition. I guess then it is a problem of
not being persuaded to reveal the key. What laws/rights does the user have 
as to revealing the key ? And if the user says "I forget"  what would be 
likely response ? 

How many users would hold tight, from cases I have heard they usually give
in when the stakes are raised.

> I'm not so sure.  Operation Sun Devil was a more sophisticated operation 
> than the average cops run.  Cops, for the most part, are incredibly lazy 
> and stupid.  I think you could count on lots of them not doing it right.

A while back a local BBS system was investigated, it was amazing to find
that the police had little knowledge of the software (MSDOS and OS/2 - Remote
Acess RA and Front Door) and hardware being used. Apparently the sysop had
the system setup so that he could quickly delete the drives FAT and do random
zeroing of the drives. Although it wasn't performed as they weren't even 
familar with hidden (attrib) directories or using non-printable dir names.
Essentially they relied on information from the sysop to carry out the 
investigation.

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