The scariest outcome here is that a bunch of lunatics get ahold of a capable model and use to to harm the rest of us, who are at a disadvantage due to just how capable the model is.
But that's what's happening. The people in charge are a bunch of lunatics. However nice it would be to prevent them from having harmful capabilities, that ship has sailed. The best we can hope for now is preventing them from having supremacy, and that's what open weight models do.
I worry about approaches like this because maybe the forensics tool fills all available space and then clears it, noticing that this particular phone is an anomaly re:
manufacturer published space = allegedly available space + size of known files
If you're hiding something in "empty space" it won't behave like empty space when you try to fill it.
I think we need to be stenographically smarter. Like if there's some mechanism of deduplicating blocks across volumes, then perhaps when given the special key you could temporarily render a volume whose parts are hidden in the data already occupied by the other volume and then just run it in memory so that a reboot clears it.
> If you're hiding something in "empty space" it won't behave like empty space when you try to fill it.
Yes, it will. It will overwrite the hidden data.
When you have a 1 TB drive that you encrypt with VeraCrypt using a hidden volume the following happens:
You have an outer decoy volume. This volume is 1TB in size and works like any other VeraCrypt volume.
You have a smaller, hidden inner volume with a different password. When you unlock this volume the following happens: Veracrypt tries to unlock the normal voume, but fails because the password is incorrect. It now tries to decrypt a secondary volume header at an offset. This header contains the layout for the hidden volume which is positioned inside the free space of the outer volume. So the position of the hidden volume is encrypted.
Now when you want to plant decoy files in the outer volume you actually do the following: While unlocking the volume you enable the option for hidden volumes and now you enter both passwords. So VeraCrypt knows where the inner volume is located and how large it is so it will not overwrite it. VeraCrypt will show the adjusted smaller size for the outer volume.
When you're in a situation where you are forced to give up your password: You tell them your decoy password. They open the outer decoy volume. It appears like any other VeraCrypt volume spanning the whole size of the disk. If they write any files to it that might overwrite parts of the hidden volume.
Notably all standard VeraCrypt volumes principally feature the option of hidden volumes. You cannot proof that a VeraCrypt volume does not have a hidden volume (short of it being full in the first place). The user base of people not using hidden volumes gives the plausible deniability to the people who do. Which is worth knowing as this can get you in trouble in certain scenarios.
There are some issues with this though:
SSD wear leveling and especially TRIM. You must not TRIM the blocks of the hidden volume, which can reveal it as it shall appear as free space that would usually be trimmed. So disable TRIM, which is suspicious in itself. Though TRIM also leaks information about file layout even for normal volumes, so there is some plausibility left. But it's not ideal. This is not an issue with HDDs (maybe with SMR though).
I don't remember exactly, but I think you can do statistical analysis on the layout of files inside the outer volume and deduct the existence of the hidden volume from this under certain circumstances. Essentially, in a normal volume the filesystem would have written this file to these blocks, but it didn't and chose other blocks instead. So there must have been a block layer translation that reroutes blocks from the hidden volume and these free blocks that should not be free must be the hidden volume. I'm not too sure that's really what it was about.
5$ wrench method. I suspect you are hiding certain information in this VeraCrypt volume. I torture you. You give me the password. The information is not in there. Either you do not have the information or you are lying and using a hidden volume. I continue to torture you for the second password on the chance that you're using a hidden volume. This is what I was about earlier when I said VeraCrypt can get you in trouble.
After they get it when they are authorized to get it. You cannot point at random things and call them evidence. For instance, I can take a dump and flush it, despite law enforcement's assertion that my stool is evidence in some imaginary crime.
Yes, when they are authorized to make a drug bust. And that's assuming they catch him before he flushes, i.e., get the drugs. Otherwise, what are they going to say? He is a drug dealer because we heard the flush? Or let's say they are doing a missing person's search and hear the flush. What now? We came looking for a missing person, but heard the flush, so there were drugs whose evidence he destroyed?
Of course, tampering with evidence is — itself - a crime. And you need evidence to prove that crime.
But yeah, people tamper with evidence because they think they can get away with it. That doesn’t mean they always succeed in cleanly doing it without creating evidence of the tampering itself.
Yes, absolutely. Something can be evidence if the police haven’t even seen it at all.
For example: the police think you are running a fraud scheme. They knock on your door. You shred a bunch of paper. The police wanted to see what was on the paper. You have violated the US law on tampering with evidence.
The prosecutor can argue that you violated some laws, but they will have to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt of that. And they will need a lot more than "I heard the shredder" to convict you. In an overall case, the shredding can be a piece of the puzzle. Shredding, standing alone, is not a crime, nor is shredding as a general matter tampering with evidence.
Yes, if someone wants to bring charges for evidence tampering, they will be required to collect additional evidence to successfully prosecute that crime. That's how it always works. They might collect fragments of the documents themselves, communications regarding the shredding, etc.
Gotta wonder how it would've gone if the citizen hadn't mentioned GrapheneOS at all and instead tried to sue them for wiping his phone without his permission.
That would be a nice outcome but whose responsibility would you make it to encourage it? Judges and juries should not grade on a curve. Prosecutors shouldn't waste taxpayer money chasing convictions that are out of reach. There's nobody with access to that calibration dimetion.
Nullify if necessary, more likely duty to justice as best as I can come to understand it.
We should all know it though!:
It has been commonly used to oppose what jurors perceive as unjust laws, such as those that once penalized runaway slaves under the Fugitive Slave Act, prohibited alcohol during Prohibition, or criminalized draft evasion during the Vietnam War.
I got selected as juror once just hoping to laugh at anything the cops said on the witness stand and let some poor soul go free but it turns out the defendant was just a violent scumbag who stabbed random people in public, and there was a video of it. After we decided he was guilty, they listed other things he had been convicted of and asked if he was a repeat offender... Let's see, shot somebody in the back, robbed liquor stores at gun point (dressed as a clown IIRC) and some other weird shit. That decision didn't take very long.
Honestly we didn't even throw the book at him, prosecutors were charging him with a bunch of offenses and we decided guilty on only two, but the repeat offender bit probably locked him up for a few decades.
The funny thing was that all the jurors thought the victim was a complete douchebag and thought both parties deserved time. As it turns, somebody I knew at the time knew the victim from childhood and he apparently molested his 8 year old cousin.
I just served on a jury and in our case, the cop was a lying scumbag, the prosecutor's expert witnesses were people milking the taxpayers to provide the evaluations that the state wanted to hear for thousands of dollars per hour, the defense's expert witnesses copy-and-pasted an evaluation from another client but didn't bother to proofread before the prosecutor brought up that they had the wrong name in the text, and the defendant raped and molested multiple kids below the age of 8, some still in diapers.
I feel like many court cases are textbook instances of Everyone Sucks Here. I needed therapy after the case because it had so shaken my faith in both the justice system and humanity.
"I feel like many court cases are textbook instances of Everyone Sucks Here. I needed therapy after the case because it had so shaken my faith in both the justice system and humanity."
I really don't think most of the people posting here understand what the professionals working in criminal justice/law see on the average day. They see the worst of the worst on one side, and then the public who they are trying to get a paycheck to defend on the other attacking them.
This in no way excuses bad behavior, but we're all human and these people aren't robots.
I don't understand the jury system. If your server is down you don't grab randos from the street to fix it.
Hell Americans know this too which is why you have a professional judge and lawyers. And you guys don't have a night watch with pitch forks and muskets to police the village anymore.
If your server is down you might ask for advice in an IRC channel, receiving help from whoever is there.
The random selection of juries was supposed to ensure they aren't any special class of people. For instance judges are usually from upper middle class backgrounds and it used to be that your innocence or guilt was decided entirely by the aristocratic nobility. By using random selection, that sort of thing is avoided.
The fundamental idea of a jury, when it comes down to it, is that you're asking 12 random people "was this person's actions reasonable?" given conflicting accounts of what those actions were. The process by which you get there is more convoluted than that (and generally assumes a higher competence by the jury than probably exists), but juries seem to do a very good job of upholding the basic idea of evaluating the reasonableness of actions.
In a jury system, the judge provides instructions to the jury about how they are supposed to weigh the evidence presented against the requirements of the law. They don't need to be technical experts. The theoretical idea of "a jury of one's peers" (while not perfect) is making a fresh decision based on the merits of the singular case, rather than a judge deciding based on prejudices they've built up over hundreds of previous cases.
When other people emulate your behavior because they appreciate the results you got, we used to call that leadership. Something has gone awry that we now call it a ripoff.
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