Rethinking Police Searches of Computers

http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/paul/gizmodo-warrant-searching-journalists-terabyte-age

by three14 • 16 years ago

36 26 16 years ago

slantyyz4• 16 years ago

If I'm a paranoid tech journalist (I'm not), everything would be tucked away in a hidden TrueCrypt volume masked as a swap file, and all my other files would be in the cloud. Not sure seizures are even useful in such a case.

protomyth• 16 years ago

I get the feeling that your "cloud" service provider will turn over your stuff quickly and inform you later.

slantyyz4• 16 years ago

That's still an uphill battle, especially if stuff ain't hosted in the country you live in.

Like I said, I'm not paranoid, so I don't have time to go to such lengths, but simply having physical access to a computer these days may not yield nearly as much evidence as it may have a decade ago.

wizard_2• 16 years ago

IANAL but I don't think they can compel you to give your truecrypt passwords as they're in your head. There was an ongoing court case (involving child pornography) about this topic.

Groxx• 16 years ago

This is assuming you keep unencrypted stuff on the cloud. If you're TrueCrypting your entire drive, you probably won't leave anything unencrypted elsewhere unless it's totally innocuous.

ErrantX6• 16 years ago

It's a good idea - and will definitely help.

However it's very hard to hide everything simply because your operating systems and programs love to store stuff.

One solution might be to use a vm stored inside an encrypted partition. So all that "meta" information is also encrypted - and the host is just clean.

epochwolf• 16 years ago

> At the very least, the courts should forbid the police from looking at any file timestamped before March 18, 2010

Except that timestamps can be altered.

pyre3• 16 years ago

True, but if someone is ordered to turn over 'all documents pertaining to topic X', they still might withhold documents. We don't allow the police to search all documents, just in case.

{edit} It would get messy if he was on a computer that had a faulty cmos battery (i.e. randomly your system clock is reset to the unix epoch). Trying to figure out the true date of files with timestamps of December 31, 1969 would be difficult. ;-) (I know that's prior to the epoch, but I had a faulty cmos battery in an old PowerBook and that's what would happen)

blasdel• 16 years ago

The timestamps are before the epoch because you live in the western hemisphere, so your timezone is GMT-N.

_delirium• 16 years ago

And they do use such limitations in cases where it'd be difficult/unlikely for them to be altered, such as timestamps kept by a third party. For example, subpoenas demanding that Google turn over email from a Gmail account usually specify a date range (I think there's even precedent that they're normally required to).

0wned2• 16 years ago

There are tools written to do just that... timestomp is great.

ErrantX6• 16 years ago

At the very least, the courts should forbid the police from looking at any file timestamped before March 18, 2010

As already pointed out timestamps can often be a problem.Limiting searches to a specific timeframe is difficult because of how the forensic tools work. It's infeasible to tell the tool "only search files and data between these dates". Indeed I wish that was possible - it would make things much faster!

But more importantly we are limited in what we can investigate. Not just for legal reasons but for cost as well. As a forensic examiner I feel (and I know most of my colleagues do as well) ethically obliged to stick to the requirements of the case - as tempting (for personal interest) as it is to poke into other corners of peoples lives it is entirely unethical and wrong.

Buckley• 16 years ago

I guess we're going to find out how good Jason Chen's back up strategy is. I doubt he'll write anything for Gizmodo for a little while, but I wonder how long it will take him to get back up and running with all of his systems seized.

sophacles3• 16 years ago

If the police are going to confiscate, why would they confiscate the whole computers, and not just the drives? Furhter, why not provide the option for the guy being served to get some new drives and copy the data to them before the police confiscate the original?

ErrantX6• 16 years ago

Usually the answer is that police, generally, have no clue about computers - enough to seize machines but not to safely remove the drives. Clearly that's not the case in this specific incident.

But there are other reasons. Firstly, when you remove drives from the machines you have to open it up, photograph them in situ, remove the drives, image and replace them. It's a reasonably time consuming job (and I doubt you'd want police in your home for hours doing it :)). Secondly there may be issues imaging the drive; wrong connectors or just fickle drives. Usually in such a case you can fire up the original machine with the drive attached and load a forensic imager from CD to pull the data (in other words it's a fail safe). And finally you have to photograph the computer CMOS time next to an atomic clock to help validate any timestamps on the hard drives.

sophacles3• 16 years ago

Awesome detailed answer, thanks! My questions come from a basic concern for the suspect, and presumption of innocence before proven guilty. A confiscated computer not only may require extra care in "plain sight" restrictions as outlined in the article, but also extra care in "undue hardship". If I keep all my records on a computer, and that computer is confiscated, I am now without any way of doing basic stuff like paying bills. It would seem that being able to retain a copy of the data is relatively trivial, so such an option should be made available. Given that current practices seem to be "never see your stuff again", is there any reason not to allow it? (Perhaps not as its taken, but shortly thereafter).

0wned2• 16 years ago

Forensic guys want to take images of the storage devices. They use tools such as dcfldd or purpose-built devices (Tableu) to do this. They'll then analyze the images and probably never touch the guy's hardware again. It will sit in a evidence room for eons. They could return the hardware as soon as they've done the imaging, but I've never seen that happen. Use whole disk encryption everywhere :)

Rethinking Police Searches of Computers

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