A 50-character password sounds about adequate.
Putting a password to protect your sensitive data is always good practice, but a 19-year-old from the UK has been jailed for not giving up his password to authorities.
Oliver Drage was arrested in May 2009 in Blackpool as part of a crackdown on child sexual exploitation. Police seized Drage's computer, but wasn't able to crack the encryption on the data stored on his drives.
The Daily Mail characterizes Drage's 50-character encryption as "sophisticated," which probably isn't untrue given that UK authorities has still yet to crack his password after 17 months of trying.
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 made it an offence with withhold passwords and access keys to hard drives – a crime that Drage is now charged with.
Of course, depending on what is stored on his hard drives, taking the charge for withholding a password could be the more desirable of charges – as long as the police never crack his sophisticated password.
Should have used a Solid State Drive...
Should have used a Solid State Drive...
lol. Nice. It should legally be different meanings
Haha yeah. Though I haven't actually read the bill...it probably covers all types of (semi)permanent storage.
I absolutely loathe that attitude! If you've got nothing to hide then why not comply with the police who want to search your car, your computer... where does it end. How about if the police decide to just start doing door-to-door home searches. If you're not hiding anything, you should have no reason to object.
Look, the guy is probably hiding something. But the burden of proof is on the police. Making it a crime to withhold passwords? Why not just waterboard the guy until he confesses. Or better yet, let's hook a car battery up to his testicles. No, I know... let's just work his ass over until he gives up the goods. Nah... that's barbaric! We can't torture people. Let's just put him in jail for 20 years or until he gives up the password and incriminates himself so we can put him in jail for 15 years.
Fortunately, in the free (for now) United States, we have the 5th Amendment protection against self-incrimination. I do concur with epol, in the absense of such protection, he should just claim that he forgot.
Lol!
On second thoughts, SSDs weren't very easy to get 17 months ago.
very crafty idea..i almost want to attempt this and ask law enforcement to try and break it
Ah yes, cheering for the pedophile's use of technology.
thats one of the many reasons we fought a war against them in the 1770s