Accused British hacker, wanted for crimes in US, won’t give up crypto keys
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
In which case I think this is just covered by PACE: https://www.gov.uk/police-and-criminal-evidence-act-1984-pac... ; but that allows items to be retained so long as an investigation is ongoing. Which would be until the US give up trying to extradite him. Given the Gary McKinnon fiasco, that's about a decade and the intervention of several Home Secretaries.
We don't actually know that with certainty. The Act contains a provision whereby someone can be forbidden from revealing that he's received an order to disclose an encryption key.
https://www.gov.uk/criminal-legal-aid-means-testing
[Edit: I got this wrong - this is a civil case!]
The civil rules are much stricter. https://www.gov.uk/civil-legal-aid-means-testing
This is precisely the kind of mystical nonsense notion that I was referring to. In their view a qualified defense must be made by a lawyer precisely for the sake of it being made by a lawyer, and for preserving the power-structure of the institution.
The simple fact that you think legal documents are no more difficult to understand than manuals is a perfect example of how woefully unprepared for the legal arena certain members of the general public are.
It takes a long time to learn statutory law, case law, common law, constitutional law, regulatory law, and their interconnections about even a single subject, and it is assumed throughout that you will have knowledge of legal concepts that aren't contained in those documents.
Is it possible to represent yourself and win? Yes. If you really know the law that well, you won't have a problem, even pro se.
The issue is that many pro se litigants are like you.
They hubristically believe the law is like an IKEA instruction booklet, advance wildly incorrect theories due to lack of foundational knowledge, end up wasting vast amounts of the court's time at taxpayer expense, and then bitterly complain that the judge didn't follow the law when they lose.
Thank you for the ad-hominem attacks. Usually these come when the interlocutor has little left to say of merit.
> A qualified defense must be made by someone with requisite legal knowledge.
And the key part of this statement is the mystical belief that requisite legal knowledge is something intangible to the case and which defies normal logic. So you'll accept a guy working in a patent office solving a difficult problem in physics, but heaven forbid he should feel qualified to represent himself in court.
>it is assumed throughout that you will have knowledge of legal concepts that aren't contained in those documents.
More mysticism?
You would be surprised how many lawyers I've talked to that would have failed out of a first semester course on formal logic.
>advance wildly incorrect theories due to lack of foundational knowledge, end up wasting vast amounts of the court's time at taxpayer expense, and then bitterly complain that the judge didn't follow the law when they lose
Actually I have had the occasion to defend myself in court. For what it's worth it took me three court appearances, because the prosecutor was completely oblivious to how groundless the case was; thus happily wasting three days of my economic productivity (which cost more than the fine would have) as well as tax payer money.
Citing Einstein as a prototypical example is somehow conceding the parent's point, don't you think?
> You would be surprised how many lawyers I've talked to that would have failed out of a first semester course on formal logic.
This I can believe; but then, law has very little to do with formal systems and the sort of informal "logic" used in legal reasoning is absolutely uninformed by anything but the first week or so of a standard intro to mathematical logic course (most legal theory/systems pre-date the advent of modern logic in the late 19th century).
I'm not citing Einstein as a prototypical example by any means, but I'm citing the idea about how we verify knowledge in a subject.
If a guy from a Burger King comes and says, hey I've got a result in theoretical physics, or hey hire me as a developer - we have a method to verify whether they can do those things in a practical way and this shouldn't require platitudes about complexity and history of jurisprudence etc. (or the equivalent for those fields).
>This I can believe; but then, law has very little to do with formal systems and the sort of informal "logic" used in legal reasoning is absolutely uninformed by anything but the first week or so of a standard intro to mathematical logic course (most legal theory/systems pre-date the advent of modern logic in the late 19th century).
Formal logic logic as far as reasoning about non-mathematical subjects is probably not that far from where it was in Aristotle's days. I don't know about the actual application of law - indeed your average jury may very well be swayed (I'll quote from yesterday):
"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury. We will show you how the defendant used the notorious hacker tool known as 'strings' to facilitate his vendetta against Lenovo."
But that a Jury would be swayed by something like that and that it's the business of prosecution to make such arguments (hypothetically) is I think precisely in support of my point about the law.
On the other hand the authors considered to be authorities Jurisprudence are, I think, very well informed in formal logic.
The author explicitly stated it's not impossible to represent yourself adequately, it's just very rarely done well.
Your theory about how judges should act only makes sense if evaluating arguments is free. But evaluating arguments -- especially unconventional ones -- is really expensive!
There is significant cost associated with evaluating an "out there" legal theory (in terms of research, opinion writing, etc.); it's entirely reasonable for judges to not invest public time/money into a point-by-point analysis of an unorthodox legal theory, especially if that theory comes from someone without formal training.
Most professionals know that certain non-professionals are capable of doing their jobs, but also know that in the general case hubris is far more common than untrained competence.
The parent's point was essentially this -- it's not impossible to represent yourself, but it's much harder than most people realize. Most judges aren't willing to invest the time necessary to investigate/help articulate apparently crazy legal theories, and that's both rational and justified. Explaining point-by-point why a crazy legal theory is crazy is not a good use of public time and money.
> Formal logic logic as far as reasoning about non-mathematical subjects is probably not that far from where it was in Aristotle's days.
That's my point -- typically "formal logic" means exactly deductions in/about formal systems. Wikipedia redirects "formal logic" to "mathematical logic".
Law has no formal logic, and (edit: a lot of) what's taught in law school pre-dates the advent of formal logic (late 1800s) by a hundred years.
The ability to prove soundness or completeness or first order logic (the sort of thing I would expect to appear in an introduction to formal logic course) is really completely irrelevant to the practice of law.
> the authors considered to be authorities Jurisprudence are, I think, very well informed in formal logic
This is simply not true, or else you have an uncommon definition of "formal logic".
There is nothing mystical about correctly understanding that the law is complex, or knowing that there are legal concepts that form a background to understanding those laws that are not contained in the statutes.
And God help you if you thought defending yourself in a criminal prosecution was a good idea. You're lucky you're not surfing this from a county jail.
Lucky. Nothing more.
Lucky he lived in a jurisdiction with fair courts. Nothing more.
But if you're dealing with an even mildly complex legal issue, I wouldn't chance it. For example, do you know all of the hearsay exceptions off-hand? If not you could fail to make an objection barring you from even raising it on appeal.
I'm completely on your side here, but as someone who bowed out of legal ambitions by late high school (and took them quite seriously prior to that), my answer is yes -- they are still burned into my brain.
That said, even having memorized these rules, I very much doubt I'd be quick enough to recall and react in a court room setting. More like I'd have to object and anything that feels like hearsay and then take a minute or two to dredge up the right thing to say (or look it up). I suspect that's the sort of thing that's an annoying waste of time to trained professionals :-)
And hearsay just kind of scratches the surface, from what I understand...
>I suspect that's the sort of thing that's an annoying waste of time to trained professionals :-)
In mock trial, we once had a Brooklyn criminal court trial judge preside over the proceedings, and she would overrule objections before even hearing their full basis, which I understand is not uncommon in certain jurisdictions, which means on-the-spot research is often not even possible.
Representing yourself is hard. But I certainly think a person should be active in his or her own defense. By all means, research precedent, examine statutes, and dig into regulations. Even professionals miss things. And even the best attorneys have multiple cases that split their attention, and far less of a stake in the outcome than the accused.
For the lawyer it's a job. For the defendant it's his life.
But when the rubber meets the road a professional attorney is the way to go in a court proceeding. Even if you are in fact so good that your attorney is only repeating an argument you constructed, they will do so bringing a vast amount of experience to bear.
Canada recently did a rather robust housecleaning on pro se litigant tactics. Meads v. Meads , amongst all the humor, provides examples of how to obtain remedy as a pro se, even if you fall into one of the vexatious litigant traps they mention.
Now, that's not say pro se representation can't be done. But it is neither a wise choice, nor a good way to structure the system for the majority of the population.
The payoff at the end, where you receive an actionable judgement, is always worth the marathon. Even if you lose, the lessons learned are extraordinarily valuable in future encounters.
An unqualified person may indeed be able to read legal documents and prepare themselves for taking on a legal case. But lawyers have had years of study in which their preparation has been legally challenged, followed by years of practice in which their preparation has been legally challenged.
a) They not only know the law, but also the likely approaches an opponent might make to arguing against it. Forewarned is, somewhat, forearmed.
But also.
b) They probably end up very good judges of how prepared they are.
I suggest this is a variant of the Dunning-Kruger effect. An untrained person might be able to study law and defend themself. I'm sure there are cases where it's easy and cases where it's hard. But, being unexperienced, they will not be good judges as to their chances of winning, what their best strategy is, or whether they have done sufficient prep to meet likely objections.
i.e. more than anything else, experience lets people judge their own progress. A beginner would be clueless in this aspect.
While law must be comprehensible by the general citizenry, this is constantly at odds with the complexity needed to support equally complex economic and social interactions.
Edit in reply:
>That is certainly correct, but not very insightful. Just because something is old it is not good.
I mention the Roman legal system, as most legal requirements that have survived several millennia intact have extremely valid reasons.
In this case, the reason is one that I have already elucidated: Human behavior is complex, and thus the law must be as well. To understand complex systems, most people need the assistance of a trained professional.
As to your second point, do you have an alternate solution? Most people have plumbing too complex for them to repair, why should anyone expect a national legal system to be more simple than household plumbing?
>If you cannot understand laws yourself you need legal guidance for everything you do...
No, you don't. There is a third alternative, and it's what most people do. They hire counsel when engaging in high-stakes disputes, negotiations, or agreements.
Second Edit:
Rhino above ^ has certainly expressed my viewpoint most clearly and succinctly here.
That is certainly correct, but not very insightful. Just because something is old it is not good.
Basically, what legal representation tries to solve is the problem that law makers want to make some laws which are no longer understandable by the general citizenry, usually for the reasons you've noted (complex interactions need complex laws(1)).
So, to solve that fundamental problem people thought a while and then introduced legal representation as a solution, which created a new problem: It is a fake solution. To be a law-abiding citizen forces you to know what you are allowed to do and what you are not allowed to do. If you cannot understand laws yourself you need legal guidance for everything you do, which is simply unfeasable in reality(2). The alternative system used in reality is "well, I think I understand what's expected of me, so I'll just do it" ... which works 80% of the time and will bite you in the ass 20% of the time. These are usually the court cases where people are "100% certain" that "I didn't do anything wrong!" while the lawyers just think "Oh yes, you did. You did, you just didn't know. Welcome in hell."
(1) At least that is usually assumed and the discussion will only get harder if we start questioning that assumption, so I'll stay with it for the moment.
(2) Due to costs, time consumption and so on. Life would come to a grinding halt if people actually followed that model.
Seems like we've come very far since ancient times /s (ref:) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Socrates
Similarly, there is a reason many engineering professions have a Professional Engineer licensure. It takes special knowledge to design complex infrastructure, just as it does to understand complex laws.
I've pointed out a necessary tension in the system that gives rise to legal complexity, and you've failed to advance any alternative theory for how it should be addressed.
It's also a pathetically laughable ad hominem to think that I've downvoted anyone, but if you think it bolsters your facile argument by all means assert falsehoods. You do know you can't down vote replies to your own comments, correct?
Lawyers do artificially keep their numbers low, but you both show a profound misunderstanding of the problem, and have seemingly no concept of how this is actually done in practice (law school as graduate rather than undergraduate education, weakening of mens rea requirements, regulations being given full legal force, restricted access to the bar examination, etc.)
> In any legal system, no matter how fair, a lawyer would be necessary.
> so you must be just as complex as society at large.
Do you see what I did there?
A lawyer is necessary because you need an expert in law's complexities. This is a fairly reasonable generalisation: the vast majority of people do not have sufficient knowledge of law to represent themselves well.
Do you not see a dis-congruity in that? Isn't it possible and/or likely that for someone else the opposite generalization would seem fairly reasonable?
For example to you law is generally complex. That may very well be true. But to some people a command-line or a circuit diagram is also something unfathomable.
But a person that's not a programmer can be good with GNU/Unix tools! Or at building circuits! I agree your average person might not be, but it's an obvious disservice to the rest of society when people talk about it as something mystically complex.
Also, while it's true that laws can be simple and to-the-point in some places, I doubt you can really say that "law must be at least as complex as its the subject matter" is an unreasonable generalisation on the whole.
I mean it's an unclear generalization to say the least. Consider concepts such as culpable state of mind, insanity, fact; it's not an exact science, so you always stop somewhere and generalize (you can't actually have the whole, or maybe even a sizable fraction of the subject matter).
>I said "the vast majority", not all people.
To be clear I'm not arguing for the total abolition of lawyers from society. What I'm talking about is the vague complexity, procedural obscurity, and the part this plays in segregating lower and upper classes.
Here we had a hacker starting a civil process to get his computers back, and the response is you're crazy law is too complicated!
Note that this response wasn't based on a tangible assessment of the complexity of his case or anything else, It was just based on a generalization which for some reason is supposed to apply to all of law. Although we would allow that for example this guy taught himself to code.
But the law is complicated because the world is complicated. Any attempt to simply the law just transfers to the complication to the court to interpret the law during litigation / trial.
Any intelligent man could figure out the law, but that is basically what lawyers are. Intelligent men who spend the time figuring out the law. And like anything, practice makes perfect. So sure, you could learn to interpret the law, but are you going to waste your time?
There are also big reasons why you don't want to represent yourself. Objectivity is paramount. I do legal analysis for a living and I'd never trust me to do it myself. You have to be somewhat detached to accurately do it. Nobody who ever talked into a patent attorney's office ever thought their own patent was obvious.
I do think that small claims court should be expanded to cover higher amounts. So that the judge can just streamline the process.
Unless you want to end up like Aaron Swartz.
I'd argue trying to be your lawyer is more like trying to be your own doctor. Don't do it unless you want to end up like Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs had a very strong understanding of law and commerce fwiw.
Yes there is. Even an educated, intelligent person has less practice at legal defense than a merely average lawyer. Statutes are also more complicated than you think. I work in an office that has a legal library, which is pretty rare these days as most places are moving to electronic sources. The sheer volume of statutes and precedents would shock you, and our legal library is on the small side since we don't deal with all areas of the law. If your life and livelihood are on the line, better to go with an expert professional than to do it yourself with no prior experience.
That is a code execution vulnerability that allows someone to take over your computer when you open an image, and it was inside windows itself.
Edit: Some Googling turned up a pastebin result [1]. Also relevant are [2] and [3].
[1]: http://pastebin.com/d0ni33Hx
At this point, can we even be certain that that's safe? If the hard drives themselves have been compromised, what's to prevent them from copying out arbitrary data?
It's too late to keep encrypted copies of the data out of his adversary's hands - they'll have imaged everything as their first step - so presumably he's either doing this because there's data there he wants, or he's just being a pain in the ass over a few hundred bucks (or pounds) worth of hardware (and more power to him if that's what's really gong on!).
If _I_ needed data off those drives, I'd get a "burner" computer that's not connected to the internet or any sort of local network, plug the drives into that and decrypt them, then get those files off the machine in the least technical way possible - transcribe them by hand, take photos of the screen, print to a usb connected (burner) printer, if the data is too big for those sort of options (or binary blobs) I'd use a serial port connection to a second trusted machine.
Then I'd melt down the drives and the burner machine.
But mostly, I'd avoid becoming a target of the NSA's attention in the first place - if I were him I'd be suspicious of any hardware known or suspected by the NSA to be used by him ever. I'd assume supply chain exploitation of any new hardware with deeply embedded firmware/hardware layer exploits. I'd only ever use (for "private" purposes) 2nd hand hardware bought for cash from strangers... If you can get "targeted" for surveillance and exploitation just for occasionally using PGP and working at the wrong company (like the Gemalto guy from Thailand), how much scrutiny would you have to expect to live under if the US military thought you'd rooted their internal networks?
Glad I'm not him...
http://www.wired.com/2015/02/nsa-firmware-hacking/
I don't know if he's considered worth this much to "the authorities", but how'd you like _that_ done to your disks?
(If I'm reading that right, by non network connected burner machine would _probably_ be safe against that, but it's clearly half decade old NSA tech. Assuming their capability hasn't improve beyond that is ... foolish...)
what utter nonsense, is being charged with a crime the same as guilt now? The article makes a point of repeatedly using the word alleged and citing that all the claims are from the prosecutor. It is extremely pernicious of you to use such language.
I have no idea why, but I always assumed that the ColdFusion source was as freely available as Apache's or PHP's.
(assuming, perhaps foolishly, that a logical interpretation exists for the hints dropped by a journalist who either doesn't fully understand, or who strove to lower his wordcount as a higher priority that technical accuracy...)