re hard drive security for fbi targets in article apr ucsu colorado edu cuffell spot colorado edu tim cuffel writes how about this i create a bunch of sets of random data and encrypt it i keep only one of the sets of random data around to show that i encypt random data for kicks the rest i delete with their keys i tell all my friends i think this establishes reasonable doubt about the contents of any encrypted files and my ability to provides keys since anyone could do this any law that forces a user to provide keys on demand is worthless the law is much worse than worthless it gives police the power to put innocent people in jail because they the police find something they don t understand most police don t know what the return key does never mind the difference between a core file and classified military secrets there are plenty of scenarios where the user would have no idea what something is either it could be uninitialized junk the burden of proof is on the user to show that it s something a normal upstanding citizen should have no one should ever be put in that situation especially in america what s disgusting about this is how easily most people go along with it to provide a bargaining chip against some hypothetical alleged child molester or drug dealer or whatever bad thing is in style at the time basically most people don t have a clear distinction between criminals and suspects as an analogy it s like they find a loose screw in your house and they insist that you re building a bomb or machine gun they ask you where it came from like you d know and ask you to prove your claim when you explain it in such simple terms people may start to get the idea as a matter of fact i do keep random files on my disk the reason is without special purpose hardware it takes a long time to generate good random bits i have programs that crank out a couple bits per minute which is pretty conservative but over time that s more than i need if you think about it there s no point in actually encrypting random data because it just gives you different random data if you want some data to look like an encrypted file you just put an appropriate header on it if enough people do this some of them will be put in jail when you get arrested and the police ask for your keys you can tell them it s just random junk although of course they won t believe you while you re sitting in jail you can take consolation in the fact that the government will burn a few cpu years trying to find something that s not there joe keane amateur cryptologist jgk osc com uunet amdcad osc jgk
