This is a legal question, but I think it's pretty relevant here. Suppose I make a drive partition where when my computer mounts the drive I have to enter a long passphrase, which is then used to do some hard math to eventually come up with a fast symetric key which is used to encrypt all blocks on the drive.
Suppose I ran freenet or whatever else on it that was supposedly illegal. When the cops come I shut off the power and since the key isn't stored anywhere nobody can decrypt the drive without the passphrase. In western coutries there is this concept of that a person may not be forced to encriminate himself, like the 5th Amendment of the US constitution for example. Can I refuse to give them the password, on the grounds that I'd be encriminating myself? I wouldn't have to answer a question like "so Mr. where did you hide your victim's body?", it seems like this may be an obvious extension of that. This protection doesn't exist under civil law. You're required to produce all documents you have and what you shred may be used against you. I suppose in such a case saying you forgot you password would still have to be plausible. The relevance to to freenet: 1) If the datastore were encrypted this way, it may be possible to asssume that the threat only comes from the outside. You may want to cache as much of the data you personally surf as possible to keep from having to rerequest it. 2) If freenet started from scratch everytime the machine was started with a new random key, you wouldn't be able to enable the authorities to access your store once the machine was shut down. This could even save you in a civil trial. This would of coarse be bad for peformance since many machines would be newbies if they were set like this and restarted all the time. I asked a friend of mine to try to find some precidence on these kinds of cases, but we couldn't get anything very conclusive. It seems like something someone here would a bit know about. __________________________________________________________________ Gesendet von Yahoo! Mail - http://mail.yahoo.de Logos und Klingelt�ne f�rs Handy bei http://sms.yahoo.de _______________________________________________ Devl mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://dodo.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
