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Comment by jdmichal | Hacker News Reader

That would be called tampering with evidence, and is very illegal in the United States. You would likely be able to be charged with that and obstruction of justice just for giving them the kill-password.

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But there's always plausible deniability :)

Good luck on plausible deniability when they have your device, enter the password that you told them, and see the device factory reset. The fun part is, regardless of whether or not the device held incriminating evidence, the act of clearing it is still illegal.

Even if you cleared the device before it was taken into custody, they could still have a case if they can reasonably show that you cleared it with suspicion that it would be taken into custody. Obviously, that can be difficult to show, depending on the burden of proof required.

Maybe this is relevant here, district court recently found that forcing suspects to reveal their phone passwords is forced self incrimination:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/09/forcing-suspects-...

(but they might just have you enter them yourself instead :/)

Forcing, yes. But they can still ask, and handing out a kill-password upon them asking would be tampering.

Oh absolutely agree with the point that was made above -- just saw this story recently and thought it was relevant.

You could argue that they were the party tampering.

The point of plausible deniability is that you have an entire fake partition, with operating system and innocuous data, which looks like it's the only one on the hard drive.

That's not the technique that was proposed at the start of this thread, to which I was responding, and so is entirely irrelevant to my comments.

I was saying that a particular technique was more effective than the originally posted one to which I responded.

I see. I misinterpreted your intention due your alternative technique never actually being introduced as such until now.

The term you're looking for is steganographic filesystem, or steganography in general.

There is no such thing as "plausible deniability". It's a nerd's fantasy of how they think things work, starting from the faulty assumption that "law" in the broadest sense of the word is a closed rule-based decision tree.

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