On Fri, 9 Jul 2004, Steve Schear wrote:
This may best be accomplished by placing the data offshore and empowering the db operators with some non-repudiatable right of disclosure (especially under duress of a warrant).
This may be impractical in some cases.
Some months back I discussed a procedural methodology where patrons could find out if their records hand been accessed in a way that circumvented court orders. I was told that it might work but that frustrated prosecutors might press charges of conspiracy before the fact to evade lawful orders that 'might' be issued, even if the defendant had no reasonable expectation that this might occur.
But we have a psychological mechanism here; many people tend to be "tough" when not under direct threat. Then they implement the mechanism. Then years flow by. Then the prosecutors come. But by then it is too late to cooperate. They are doomed (though that depends largely on the available lawyers), but it can save the ones they were protecting. It seems that, by the prosecutor logic, just about any comsec improvement you implemented may be viewed as a conspiracy, including but not limited to secure email. I am not happy to say this, but can we ever hope for designing any kind of secure infrastructure without some nodes having to win the martyr lottery? ....speaking about martyrs... I am just watching a TV document about cults. Maybe we could piggyback on religion and use some kinks within Christian doctrine, selected for having wide user base within Western civilization? Eg, finding a believable and theologically coherent explanation how operating a Darknet node helps undermining the reign of Satan (a voice suggests me that the Book of Prophecies, or how that horsemen thing is called, could contain enough of material to build on)? That could provide a decent amount of node ops using existing infrastructure of likely-minded religious organizations. Faith is a big motivation for undertaking risk, and while Westerners currently tend to be less radical than Middle-Easterners, this kind of mission is far from suicidal. But one of the voices in my head just told me that shared MP3s would bring in more people with less effort...
"The law is an ass." -- Charles Dickens
Maybe because most of it comes out of ass-holes?