At 8:05 AM 7/18/96, jim bell wrote:

It has long occurred to me, considering the size and low power of the typical 3.5" hard drive compared with the size of the typical house or apartment, that it might be an interesting project to remotely connect such a (hidden) drive to your computer using a reasonably surreptious link that is difficult to trace. Say, an IR optical link, a single bare (unjacketed) optical fiber, a LAN with hidden nodes, or a similar system. Maybe an inductive pickup. In any raid, they'll have to decide what to take, and chances are very good that they won't find every hidden item.

I think the druggies call this a "rat line": two apartments next to each other, with the humans living in one and the drugs stored in the other. The drugs are gotten through a hole in the wall. (Hey, I'm not saying it works, or that it stops raids, prosecutions, convictions, etc. Just noting the existence.) Any multi-unit apartment can do this already, with data. The hard disk can be upstairs and two units away, connected with Ethernet (as many apartment buildings out here in California already are), or whatever. Any raid on Unit 3B, for example, finds that no files are stored locally. A separate investigation and/or search warrant for whereever the files actually are stored would be of course problematic and/or delayed. (Friends of mine have worked on "remote storage" ideas for exactly such applications. Clearly there are many options: storage in other local sites, storage in offshore sites, encrypted storage, even storage by a "priest" functionary ("Son, I am ready to receive your digitally transmitted confession.").) Lots of possibilities. For various reasons, few have been pursued. (Mostly because, I think, there have been relatively few raids on data, and when there have been raids, there were usually other HUMINT-type factors involved. E.g., few child porn rings are going to be broken only on the basis of seized disks. As this situation changes, expect more "data archival" services to evolve.) --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."