-- Tim Starr:
Show me exactly which law I am breaking by placing some of my documents or files in a place even I cannot "turn over all copies from."
I have never heard of such a law.
Black Unicorn:
If you know you've committed some kind of weapons violations or some such and you have reason to believe you have come to the attention of the authorities, burning the record of those bulk AK-74 purchases might be a bad idea- if you got caught.
Tim Starr:
IBM instructed employees to destroy records. At Intel, we destroyed records--I did so as part of the "Crush" program (to drive several competitors out of business). So long as we were not being ordered to turn over evidence, not any kind of crime.
Same here. Black Unicorn is just making this stuff up. Black Unicorn
This was my theory. Hence my language: "It almost sounds tantamount..." Hence my cite of the definition of spoliation below, for comparison. Hence my discussion of a prosecutor's likely tactic in making the argument. Encrypting to an "irrecoverable" key certainly comes close to if not outright meets the technical definition of spoliation in Black's Law Dictionary. What "irrecoverable" means will depend on the judge probably.
Tim Starr:
But, Black Unicorn, you're the one who chose to lecture all the children here.
I have asked for a cite that shows that higher courts, up to the Supreme Court, have held that using Freenet or encryption would constitute spoliation, which you brought into the discussion as a reason why Cypherpunks had better not count on using encryption, or offshore storage, or any other means that might cause the court to "not be amused."
They didn't get John Gotti for whispering, so I doubt "spoliation" is nearly the tool you and Aimee Farr seem to think it is.
In the case of Black Unicorn, it appears to me he was a lawyer who used to be in the business of finding loopholes in laws. In a world where governments seldom bother to read their own laws, and when they do so bother they find that everyone is a felon, that is a dying business. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG nTddd9XZ1iJqpU0/ppYWEqYOLwArmipx2klG73S 4n86cH5ve4oq1hb/spodUgjWicxLpkJKTrn3FMB7h