'Blackburn, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled that the Fifth Amendment posed no barrier to his decryption order. The Fifth Amendment says that nobody may be "compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself," which has become known as the right to avoid self-incrimination. "I find and conclude that the Fifth Amendment is not implicated by requiring production of the unencrypted contents of the Toshiba Satellite M305 laptop computer," Blackburn wrote in a 10-page opinion today. He said the All Writs Act, which dates back to 1789 and has been used to require telephone companies to aid in surveillance, could be invoked in forcing decryption of hard drives as well. Prosecutors in this case have stressed that they don't actually require the passphrase itself, and today's order appears to permit Fricosu to type it in and unlock the files without anyone looking over her shoulder. They say they want only the decrypted data and are not demanding "the password to the drive, either orally or in written form."'

'MtGOX has $1k/day, $10k/month cashout limits. He won't get far selling them all on MtGox rapidly.' -- '...encrypting the wallet only solves part of the problem: you must still decrypt it to RAM to use it, and an attacker that has access to your computer can still get it at that moment. Of course that still makes it harder for him to do so. I think we are (sadly) going to see more and more threads like this as time goes by and bitcoin value goes up. The real solution in my mind is to use a special install of an OS, perhaps on a USB key, that you only use to do payments. Even better, we could imagine dedicated bitcoin devices based on ARM or similar, that would run a minimalistic linux and the bitcoin client; with a heavily encrypted wallet.'

'You and I sign a contract. In the contract, we specify a private arbitrator. The contract includes the private arbitrator’s public key. The contract is digitally signed by both you and me. Now, you think I violated the contract. You demand arbitration. The arbitrator rules that I owe you damages. I refuse to pay. The arbitrator writes a brief statement that I agreed to—that he would be the arbitrator of disputes, that he gave a verdict, and that I refused to pay the damages. Digitally signs it and gives it to you. You now have a package. That package consists of the original contract which I digitally signed, so provably I agreed to it, and the arbitrator’s verdict, which he digitally signed, so provably the arbitrator I agreed to, said that I cheated. You may now e-mail that package to anybody else in the industry. -- You want the arbitrator who gets the right result at low cost. This is a market mechanism for generating efficient law for the private market.'

'The people in this room hope for a world where an individual's informational footprints -- everything from an opinion on abortion to the medical record of an actual abortion -- can be traced only if the individual involved chooses to reveal them; a world where coherent messages shoot around the globe by network and microwave, but intruders and feds trying to pluck them out of the vapor find only gibberish; a world where the tools of prying are transformed into the instruments of privacy. There is only one way this vision will materialize, and that is by widespread use of cryptography. Is this technologically possible? Definitely. "Arise," urges one of their numbers, "You have nothing to lose but your barbed-wire fences."'

'Two people have been successfully prosecuted for refusing to provide authorities with their encryption keys, resulting in landmark convictions that may have carried jail sentences of up to five years. The power to force people to unscramble their data was granted to authorities in October 2007. Between 1 April, 2008 and 31 March this year the first two convictions were obtained.'

'A group of computer scientists at the University of Washington has developed a way to make electronic messages “self destruct” after a certain period of time, like messages in sand lost to the surf. The researchers said they think the new software, called Vanish, which requires encrypting messages, will be needed more and more as personal and business information is stored not on personal computers, but on centralized machines, or servers. ...the researchers said they had struck upon a unique approach that relies on “shattering” an encryption key that is held by neither party in an e-mail exchange but is widely scattered across a peer-to-peer file sharing system. Vanish makes it possible to control the “lifetime” of any type of data stored in the cloud, including information on Facebook, Google documents or blogs. The significance of the advance is that the Vanish “trust model” does not depend on the integrity of third parties, as other systems do.'

'It may happen that you are forced by somebody to reveal the password to an encrypted volume. There are many situations where you cannot refuse to reveal the password (for example, due to extortion). Using a so-called hidden volume allows you to solve such situations without revealing the password to your volume.'

'In cryptography and steganography, deniable encryption is encryption that allows its user to deny the fact that he encrypted a file or partition, even if he actually did encrypt. Deniable encryption allows an encrypted message to be decrypted to different sensible plaintexts, depending on the key used, or otherwise makes it impossible to prove the existence of the real message without the proper encryption key. This allows the sender to have plausible deniability if compelled to give up his or her encryption key.'

'Encrypt the data to a key you don't know. It sounds crazy, but stay with me. Caveat: Don't try this at home if you're not very familiar with whatever encryption product you're using. Failure results in a bricked computer. Don't blame me.' -- Comment: florian: 'This could be the basis of an interesting startup. One sends the key to this startup which transfers it to several persons out of a set of a lot of people, randomly so that no-one at the startup know who got the key. After successful arrival, one notifies the startup which then notifies all people. Those who got the key then physically transfer it to the traveler. This wouldn't be just plausible deniability, this would mean that one truly doesn't know who got the key.'

"As the only integrated solution for encryption and backup, Knox 1.6.1 makes securing your files easier than ever. Create as many encrypted vaults as you want, each with separate passwords. Then schedule automatic backups. You can even reformat USB sticks and external drives as encrypted Knox vaults — moving files between Macs has never been so simple and secure."

"We're talking really easy here!!! :-)" -- Easy

"Of course, a security guard or investigator could later unecrypt the faces, with the proper key (or a subpoena). So a person wouldn't know for sure he was hidden from the cameras forvever. But at least the decrypting would be an auditable event."

"... the engineer had just discovered that all information processing machines send their secrets into the electromagnetic ether."

Give up, basically.

"Technology breeds hacks, little clever tricks to cheat the rules. Every living organism cheats its way to survival. If life is any guide, then, for every rule we’ll be able to find a technology that has hacked around that rule."