On Tue, Mar 03, 2009 at 02:31:13PM -0700, Joseph Oreste Bruni wrote: > http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/03/encryption_password_ruling/ > > Hi List, > > This article caught my eye. One of the things that I gleaned from the > article is that it's obvious that law enforcement (at this level) does > not have the ability to brute-force crack PGP encrypted data. Instead, > the courts are attempting to force the surrender of the passphrase.
Well, maybe. It's also possible that law enforcement does have the ability to get into the encrypted data (by some means - I doubt brute force), but does not want the knowledge of that ability to be made public. (Note, incidentally, that this seems to be the "PGP Whole Disk" product, rather than a PGP message, a la OpenPGP.) It's an odd case. Law enforcement *knows* what is on the laptop in this case. They saw it there before the computer was powered down (thus locking the drive). They are arguing over whether the protection against self-incrimination (part of the US Bill of Rights, for those who don't live here) even applies - after all, if law enforcement already knows what is there, revealing the contents does not incriminate. Anyway, I, of course, am not a lawyer. Instead, here is a discussion of this case from someone who is: http://volokh.com/posts/chain_1197670606.shtml David _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
