Spoilation, escrows, courts, pigs.

[jamesd at echeque.com]

    --
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
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