About lawyers and spoliation

[Aimee Farr]

Bear wrote, quoting me:

> >Hiding or secrecy as a total strategy has historically been
> limited by the
> >Rule Of Secrets/Least Safe Principle, and the equally-important "well,
> >doesn't this look suspicious!" -- a rule of natural law and human
> >disposition. Crypto is not a person, object and asset
> invisibility machine.

> Ebay may be a good thing, but can you imagine how useless it would
> be if it had to be kept secret from law-enforcement types?  You'd
> pretty much have to keep it secret from the whole public, and then
> of course nobody would use it.

I guess that would be flip-side of the Rule Of Secrets, or something.

> I've got a nice protocol for running a fully-encrypted mailing list
> stegoized in images on a web/FTP site, which would be totally invisible
> to non-participants - but such a list can't be announced publicly
> so of course nobody could find out about it and join it, without
> also letting the law know about it and join it.

Interesting.

Just as interesting:

-NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U.S. 448 (1958)
-Laird v. Tatum, 408 U.S. 1 (1972)
-Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends v. Tate,
519 F.2d 1335 (3d Cir. 1975)
-Reporters Comm. for Freedom of the Press v. American Tel. & Tel., (D.C.Cir.
1978)
-Gordon v. Warren Consol. Bd. of Educ, 706 F.2d 778 (6th Cir. 1983)
-Alliance to End Repression v. Chicago, 627 F.Supp. 1044 (N.D.Ill.1985)

> And the list goes on.  Every time you try to get something used by
> more than a dozen people, it cannot be secret.

"Three make keep a secret, if two of them are dead." -- Benjamin Franklin,
1728.

> What cannot be
> secret, you can't keep the law from knowing about.  What you can't
> keep the law from knowing about, you can't keep the law from trying
> to regulate.

That's probably one of those "universal truths" I've been talking about.
*laughter*

> And regulation of anything on the internet can happen, because EVERY
> IP address is in principle traceable.  Oh, it may take a week or
> two -- they may have to slap your ISP with an order to preserve logs
> and wait for the next time something happens if you're on DHCP, or
> they may have to get the cooperation of one or more other governments
> if your login trail runs outside their jurisdiction -- but ultimately,
> it's traceable.

Hm. For an equally-relevant proposition, See United States v. White, 401
U.S. 745 (1971); United States v. Miller, 425 U.S. 435 (1976).

I've seen predictions that by 2005-7, your IP will be biometrically
associated. (I have nothing to back to that up, but the source was
credible.)

~Aimee