Decryption: Jailed for keeping schtum

from freedompress, 16 January 2010:

A 33-year old has been sentenced to nine months imprisonment for refusing to decrypt his personal computer files.

Judge Hetherington declared that the man, in spite of initial police suspicions, poses no threat to national security, and made it clear that his failure to cooperate with the police and to comply with a section 49 notice to provide passphrases to his encrypted computers was the reason the harsh sentence was handed down.

The man is believed to be the first person sentenced under Part III of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), which came into power in October 2007. RIPA Part III was set up on the pretext that the government required legal access to suspected terrorists' secret files of death and destruction. In the words of Jack Straw who introduced the legislation:

"It was government trying to put in place increased powers so that we could preserve and sustain our democracy against this new kind of threat"

The threat in this case turns out to be a 33-year old man originally from London, with somewhat unusual hobbies and a distrust of authorities. Enough to put anyone in the slammer, clearly. To make matters worse he has a history of mental illness, and is currently serving his time at a secure mental health unit.

The long and complicated case involves the police taking his passport, confiscating his computers and eventually kicking his door down and charging in with sub-machine guns. The raid led the poor bloke to call the cops, not realising they were already there.

He was initially arrested in September 2008 coming back on the Eurostar from Paris, where French police sniffer dogs had detected the model rocket he was carrying. The rocket, made by American hobby company Estes, was in its original packaging and did not include the rocket engine.

However the Metropolitan Police's elite Counter-Terrorism Command (CTC), saw it fit to detain the suspect at the high security facilities of Paddington Green police station. During several hours' questioning, he made no comment.

After being released on police bail in spite of minute traces of explosives detected on his body, he returned to the station as appointed. This time he was re-arrested for carrying a pocket knife.

At this point CTC demanded he provide access to several hard drives and USB key drives which they had seized during investigations. Refusing to do so, he was warned they would seek a section 49 notice under RIPA Part III, which gives a suspect a time limit to supply encryption keys or make target data intelligible. Failure to comply is an offence under section 53 of the same Part of the Act and carries a sentence of up to two years imprisonment, and up to five years imprisonment in an investigation concerning national security.

Following the warning he was bailed again. Feeling harassed by the police and insisting he had done nothing wrong, he did not return as appointed. This lead to the police raid on his home on 7 March this year.

On this third arrest police served the section 49 notice, signed by CTC's Superintendent Bell, which read: "I hereby require you to disclose a key or any supporting evidence to make the information intelligible." He was given one hour to comply, during which he maintained his silence.

Insisting throughout on his right to remain silent is ultimately what allowed him to be charged, on ten counts, under RIPA Part III.

He was also charged for his missed bail appearance and for two attempts to get a new passport, falsely claiming his was lost. He says CTC told him he would not get the one they had seized back, so he applied for a new one.

At the trial on June 2 he pleaded guilty to all charges, wrongly believing he would be released that day thanks to time served. Instead, taking into account the passport offences and missed bail, he received a total of 13 months.

Before finishing what would have been a six-and-a-half-month prison term during September, the 33-year old was sectioned under the Mental Health Act. He now does not know when he will be released from hospital.

During the investigation CTC liaised with the National Technical Assistance Centre (NTAC), part of the intelligence agency GCHQ, which attempts to decipher encrypted files for intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

During sentencing, the judge seemed to confirm that NTAC staff had failed to access the data, which was encrypted using PGP (an open-source two-key encryption package). "To this day no one really has any idea as to what is contained in that equipment," he said. Apparently one file encrypted using software from the German firm Steganos was cracked, but investigators found only another PGP container.

via emai

Bookmark/Search this post with:

delicious | digg | reddit | newsvine | furl | google | yahoo | technorati