Contempt of court

>>>Note that a court could cite you for contempt for not complying
>>>with a subpoena duces tecum (a subpoena requiring you to produce objects
>>>or documents) if you fail to turn over subpoenaed backups.

Assume that your application is running (mirrored) on five machines in 
five different jurisdictions and the machines will lock out one or more 
of their number if they receive a panic code, or one goes offline 
unexpectedly, or is not accessed in exactly the right way, you could 
easily respond to a subpoena duces tecum by stating truthfully that the 
requested records are not (or are no longer) under your control.

The machines themselves can also be protected by careful choice of 
location and judicious use of remailers and requirements that they only 
be accessed by telenetting, etc.

Besides what's the big deal about contempt of court.  If you are worried 
about doing 2 years or less, locate yourself in another jurisdiction.  
No need to expose your body to high risk legal regimes.

Duncan Frissell

"But your Honor, I'm desperately trying to *conceal* my contempt for 
this court."

Duncan Frissell writes:
 > >>>Note that a court could cite you for contempt for not complying
 > >>>with a subpoena duces tecum (a subpoena requiring you to produce objects
 > >>>or documents) if you fail to turn over subpoenaed backups.
 > 
 > Assume that your application is running (mirrored) on five
 > machines ...

I think that Mr. Frissell's suggestion falls into the category of what
I've humbly termed "digital flash paper" mechanisms.  In the days of
yore, numbers runners and gangsters and nefarious bad guys would keep
records on cellulose (?) flash paper which could be ignited and
destroyed very rapidly should Elliot Ness be seen approaching the
front door.

Another (simpler) suggestion made by a friend was to devise
motion-sensitive devices which would cause total corruption of
information stored on a disk if it were moved.

My highly esteemed legal opinion is that this could be considered
criminal obstruction of justice, though as with the contempt of court
issue such a charge might be preferrable to one of Sedition :-)

--
Mike McNally

I wouldn't want to encourage anyone to contempt of court, but, strictly
hypothetically, there is a very simple way to answer the request to hand
over keys to encrypted data.  Simply assure that you have a copy of the
encrypted data available, then construct one-time-pad data of the same
length as the encrypted data, such that when the two are XORed, you get
your choice of plaintext.  Hand over the "one time pad."  This argues
powerfully that one might want such one time pads available and in use
even if you are really using a more convenient encryption technology.

Kids: don't do this at home.