The penalty for not giving up keys is max 2 years in prison. Most offences that they're trying to use the encrypted data to use as prosecution evidence (for example, child pornography), have penalties that are way more than 2 years in prison.
If you're genuinely innocent, the 2 years is horrid. If you're actually guilty, it's a cheap way to serve your time.
It's a weird and perverse law that shouldn't exist, but it's likely in time the government will need to move the needle one way or the other, as habitual criminals are getting used to doing the maths.
Is there a academic study of the heuristic of choosing between option A versus option B?
People (even criminals) are not perfectly economic thinkers. That's probably a good thing. I have this terrible thought of a quant rapist: juggling their risk that the victim stays quiet or otherwise acts (police or revenge). Deciding on the Kelly Criterion for losing 20 years in prison.
I'd watch a movie about a killer using statistics properly. It is annoying when muderers are cast as being idiots. I imagine the protagonist runs a hedge fund and gets bored of getting away with white collar crime.
In this modern age, I'm rather interested in the inverse: lawmakers doing proper scientific research, and legislating based on that; attempting to discover the sociological or economical truths rather than chasing slogans and acting on beliefs and agendas.
They do that in many countries. Basically they check the likelihood of being a repeat offender and try to minimize that. Tax crimes become harsher than violent crimes because of it, for example… it is not popular amongst the population though.
A behaviorist perspective on justice, punishment, and rehabilitation does not require morality.
1. Pragmatism - Justice can be effectively framed around practical outcomes and societal safety, it requires no moral framework.
2. Remorse and Emotional Response - Feelings of remorse can be understood as conditioned responses shaped by environmental influences rather than as reflections of moral responsibility; remorse does not necessitate moral weight as they can arise from societal conditioning and past experiences.
3. CBT - Cognitive Behavioral Approaches demonstrate that behavioral and emotional changes can occur without delving into moral implications, and requires no moral reflection.
4. Behavioral Accountability - Individuals can be held accountable for their actions based solely on their observable behavior and its consequences, without the need for moral judgments. The focus is on modifying harmful behaviors through interventions and reinforcements rather than assigning moral blame.
So, this framework provides a rational and effective approach to understanding and managing human behavior, focusing on the pragmatic aspects of justice, rehabilitation, and accountability, it does not require an already shaky and subjective moral judgment or moral accountability, and as thus, need not be morally justified.
If you want me to elaborate (with examples, too), I am willing to as my time allows.
I know a woman who was raped by her father. The state is going to release him in a few years, so now her family lives in terror of that day. Where is the justice in that, and what does the rapist bastard being or or not being a ""rational economic actor"" have to do with any of it?
Indeed, a big part of a society's system of justice is "letting most people sleep at night."
Whether there's justice or not in a rapist serving their sentence and going free (given that, one assumes, the sentencing guidelines were decided by dispassionate thinkers trying to reason about society as a whole)... It goes out the window if a family lives in so much fear they decide to "fix" the issue by taking the law into their own hands.
Then the society has to decide whether to jail the family, and so on.
Hammurabi's code seems harsh by modern standards, but at the time it was positively progressive. It was attempting to replace a retaliatory tradition so bloody it could wipe out entire bloodlines. He was trying to impose an upper limit on consequence to allow a society of semi-strangers to reach some meta-stability.
>Is there a academic study of the heuristic of choosing between option A versus option B?
I don't know of a paper on that specific question, but for example, Gary Becker got his Nobel prize because he applied economics to a wide range of human behavior including crime and punishment. Here is a famous paper of his on crime:
> I'd watch a movie about a killer using statistics properly.
At the start of the movie Heat, one of the hot head robbers kills one of the guards. De Niro, the leader of the robbers, immediately kills the other guard and says something along the lines of 'it's capital murder either way so may as well not leave any witnesses'. Ultimately, it's Di Nero being non-rational and driven by emotion that leads to the final scene in the movie.
> People (even criminals) are not perfectly economic thinkers.
This imperfection feeds into the argument for not punishing rape as harshly as murder: the rapist is likely to misjudge the chances of the murder being discovered and traced back to them, when doing the risk math to decide how to proceed. If their imperfect thinking leads them to overestimate their chance of pulling off the perfect murder (or the perfect coverup after one) then that pushes the chance of equal punishment leading to more murders higher.
"Doing risk math" oversells it for crimes of opportunity, where decisions about how to keep the action quiet after it has happened is going to be very emotion/panic (rather than facts/stats) driven, but for premeditated attacks I suspect things will flip the other way.
> People (even criminals) are not perfectly economic thinkers. That's probably a good thing.
why is that a good thing?
Perfect economic thinkers are good, because they'd be predictable and can be reasoned with. Providing economic incentives to such means you can direct behaviour in an easy and efficient way.
Irrational thinkers cannot be reasoned with via economic rationality. Therefore, either you have to stack the incentives so high that the cost becomes overbearing, or you use some other means of control that's less nice.
Being perfect economic thinkers doesn't mean they are all powerful. How does one go kill one guy without consequence? The only person this perfect economic thinker has access to is himself, and surely, he values his own life at infinity.
Ethics is an agreement between people in society, which cannot be captured via economic rationalism alone, but economic rationalism can take into account current ethics, as well as other actors' propensity for more or less ethics.
Like Germany and the UK?
However, it's no problem at all for them to supply Israel with support in their murder of 18,000+ children. Remote killing good, local killing bad?
agreed, which was also my point, but you seemed to think I was making the mistake, common on this site, that American rules pertain all over the world, which was not even what the discussion was about!
on edit: got confused as to who was whom in the nesting.
on second edit: I also don't know if there is anywhere that has execution for rape, it was a hypothetical as I read it.
Would be rapists and murderers simultaneously aren't deterred from committing their crime in the first place by the threat of execution, but also will escalate their crime in response to the threat of execution. Very curious.
Liberal Europeans and Americans like to say that no civilized country executes criminals, but in fact several developed democratic countries in Asia do, and to say they aren't civilized seems absurd. Executing criminals seems to work well for them. Very curious.
> no civilized country executes criminals, but in fact several developed democratic countries in Asia do, and to say they aren't civilized seems absurd.
If you're saying the first bit, you're saying that it's a disqualifier from the second.
And I'm saying that anybody who claims Japan, South Korea or even Singapore isn't civilized is being absurd. Their own country is almost certainly more dangerous than those, there are very few countries with lower intentional homicide rates than those three.
It is, perhaps, worth observing that one of the stories told about how English law pulled back from death-penalty-for-thievery was that if a thief had their life on the line already, they may as well murder too.
It's an interesting story, but the historical record of how English law changed is, I think, a bit more interesting. Kids in London would steal. They'd go on trial. A jury of Londoners would see what looked like a twelve-year-old in the docket and just flat-out refuse to find them guilty because they couldn't sleep with themselves thinking they'd sent some kid to the gallows. This pattern became such an issue that merchants petitioned the King to pull back the penalties because as the system was implemented, it was going to stop protecting their property from thievery.
When you are released from prison, they can simple ask you to decrypt the data again, and if you refuse or can't, you have broken a law with another 2 years in prison (5 if they think you could have anything to do with 'terrorism').. Its theoretically an infinite prison sentence for forgetting your passwords.
This is correct - but I’d rather my law enforcement had a pre-existing reason to investigate me rather than just stumbling upon something in random hidden searches. Innocent until proven guilty is key here.
I have nothing to hide, but I’m still not giving you access to my photo library.
Those warrants are secret. We don't even know if they're following the rules they lay out.
In the US, the secret FISA court hasn't turned down a single warrant. Either the government is only coming to them with completely justified cases or they're just a rubber stamp. Either way, there's no oversight so we have no way of knowing.
You seem to think that the indexing and searching happens only if there is a reason. Why do you think that? There are all kinds of cases where government agents were found to have abused access to data for reasons that had nothing to do with illegal or immoral behavior by a target.
RIPA notices do indeed assume you’re in possession of the keys of anything encrypted and you must disclose when asked nicely.
You just need an airtight provable way of showing you have a way to destroy that key when you push a button and do that before the notice arrive. I suspect that’s after they seize your stuff.
I was stopped and questioned twice within a span of about ten minutes while walking around near Parliament in the middle of the night because someone _supposedly_ called in some sort of a threat. I was severely jetlagged and had never been to London before, so I figured it wouldn't be any different than walking around NYC but that may have been naive on my part.
You can walk around 99.9% of central London at any time of night and nobody is going to raise any eyebrows no matter how jet-lagged you look. But there's always a chance you're going to attract some attention outside Parliament, or certain embassies, especially if there's an "elevated threat level" or whatever.
First time I was arrested for being next to a fight until I was cleared of any involvement. This required some explaining and the policeman was an idiot.
Second time some busybody reported to the police that I was carrying a knife. This was a Santoku knife that I'd literally bought and was still in the plastic packaging but you could see it through the plastic bag I was carrying it in. We had a bit of a laugh about it and they apologised for wasting my time. They did however arrest me so that they could do a formal search and had right to as they had reasonable suspicion I was carrying it as a weapon. I'm not bothered they were very reasonable and so was I.
In the US both of those would have been handled with an Investigatory detention - same as being pulled over for a traffic stop. Not even remotely an arrest.
> They did however arrest me so that they could do a formal search and had right to as they had reasonable suspicion I was carrying it as a weapon.
What "reasonable suspicion"? They could see the "weapon" that had been reported and at that point it should have been "have a nice day" and then them trundling themselves over to whoever called it in and charged them with making a false report.
I swear, UK police seem generally nicer than US cops but infinitely dumber and the shit you brittons put up with in terms of having your rights violated is astounding.
> In the US both of those would have been handled with an Investigatory detention - same as being pulled over for a traffic stop. Not even remotely an arrest.
I'm not from the UK, but it seems likely that this is just a question of semantics. Many US traffic stops are far more stressful—and handled in a way that is far less conciliatory—than the "arrest" that OP describes. It doesn't sound like they were taken to a police station or even necessarily handcuffed, more just formally detained.
As for US detentions: It doesn't especially matter if they're not technically "arrests" in US parlance, you're still being stopped by the police and you still can't go anywhere until they let you because there's a too-high probability that they'll find an excuse to make your life miserable if you don't cooperate.
"Reasonable suspicion" is the UK equivalent of what Americans call "probable cause" i.e. jargon for when the police are allowed to search you.
The police have to conduct stops in a certain manner, because of the law that gives them the power to stop people: They are legally required to tell the person they're being detained for the purposes of a search, the purpose of the search, the grounds for the search, and the legal power used.
Getting a load of jargon thrown at you about "detained" and "offensive weapon" and "Police and Criminal Evidence Act" sound a bit officious, but once they've stopped you they've got to give you the officious jargon, it's required by law.
Also, while it's rare that the police will have occasion to stop and search a middle class, middle age white guy like myself, when the situation does come up, it's reasonable for them to do it thoroughly and by the book. They should treat a report of me carrying a knife the same as they'd treat a report of a black teenager in a bad neighbourhood carrying a knife.
Because of the increase in knife crimes in the last couple of years the UK police have become incredible aggressive towards anybody in possesion of even small purpose knifes in public. I'm honestly surprised OP got away with it.
Buying a knife and carrying it home is 100% legal, so there's nothing to "get away with" here.
Carrying a Santoku knife in public is only illegal if it's being carried without a "good reason" and carrying a newly purchased knife home is certainly a good reason.
The police have the power to stop and search people when they have "reasonable grounds" to suspect they're carrying a weapon; if the knife is clearly visible that's certainly reasonable grounds. So the search was not illegal.
A stop-and-search means being "detained" in the sense that you are not free to leave until the search is completed, but it's not an "arrest" that would appear on your arrest record. Perhaps there was a miscommunication about the distinction between being 'detained' and being 'arrested' ?
> If they don't like your face they can just decide the good reason is not good enough
The article you linked does not support the claim that the UK police not liking someone's face is sufficient for them to be allowed to stop and search someone.
> A person’s physical appearance [...] cannot be used as the reason for stopping and searching them [...] unless there is information or intelligence giving a specific description of a person suspected of carrying an item for which there is a power to search.
If you are stopped at the border then you don't have such a right. British border force can just demand you give them keys to all your devices and hold them for 7 days, no court order needed.
The part that stood out to me, copying from the automatic transcript:
> they're sitting there with these like blank A4 Bits of Paper writing down everything I'm telling them like you know bits of interest and it's exactly the same thing the Russians did when they interrogated me [...] to be honest interactions with the Russians have been pretty much the same as inter with the British government
I didn't do my research before going to the UK for the first time two months ago and just went with my gut feeling, that is, deleting files from my phone that I don't want to end up in a government system through Cellebrite's "accelerated justice" or whatnot. Never done this for any other country before (I cross borders on a weekly basis). Seeing this video and the Ugandan article from the sibling comment, that was definitely the right move
I get bagged and tagged at least once a week when I go shopping in the UK in the last 50 years. You don’t want to come here at all. I’d rather hang around in Russia these days.
Facetious comment aside the only time I’ve had problems with border security anywhere is getting a large carpet back home from Azerbaijan. This was very interesting and required them to examine every square centimetre of it. China, US, UK, Europe all really boring. Russia was incompetent. They didn’t even check anything at all (2012)
I don’t know of any country where border guards don’t have the authority to seize your device if you’re trying to cross.
I just use devices with ephemeral storage for crossing borders to save myself from having to do any research on any particular country’s device privacy practices.
Then I'm not sure what we're criticizing China for, if no country has such fundamental rights for the people under its control. The warrant system exists for a reason. I'm not more likely to be carrying something illegal when going between countries than within the jurisdiction where my registered place of residence is; less if anything because there might be spot checking indeed
You don't have the right to say no or even stay silent. If you refuse to give up your passwords they will charge you with the whatever the legislation around it is, it's 2 years behind bars for refusing.
Probably not, just a waste of money and time, but hopefully someone can provide a reasonable recourse.
What if you say you forgot? I actually had times (after not having used my phone for a month or two) that I (& my muscles) forgot my PIN (not for the SIM card) and I had to do a factory reset.
Well it's not automatic 2 year prison sentence. The state charges you with a crime, it goes to trial, and then you have to defend yourself - if your argument is that you forgot, then it would be an interesting case - ultimately the prosecutor would need to prove that it's unlikely you forgot, say if they had proof (say CCTV recording at the airport) showing you using your phone 5 minutes before it was confiscated - it would be pretty hard to argue that in the space of those 5 minutes you forgot the password. But if you had a device in your suitcase and could successfully argue that you haven't used it in ages and the password was long and complex then yeah, I guess you'd be found not guilty - up to the judge/magister/jury depending on where exactly in the justice system you end up. But yeah, while stopped at the border saying "I forgot" is not a good card to play.
It probably won't end well but I'm curious what would happen if you give them a password that resets the device. Theoretically it unlocks it, it's just that it takes a minute and it's factory new at that point.
They'd charge you with destroying evidence, or "perverting the course of justice". They aren't stupid, they would know that you gave them a password that wiped the device.
An Immigration Officer may search you until they are satisfied you are a citizen. As long as you have a passport (or emergency travel document) listing you a citizen, this should be straightforward and they're unlikely to have grounds for any further search. At that point, you have been let into the country.
Customs Officers are much more likely to have grounds for a search — if they believe you are bringing prohibited material on the electronic device into the country (and "reasonable grounds" is low, as it typically is for customs — "you're acting kinda sus" is a reasonable ground), they can search your device. It is an offence to refuse a search, so while you've been admitted to the UK, you could be arrested for that offence.
This is all broadly comparable to most other countries immigration and customs laws; the UK is not an outlier here.
The problems with the UK are primarily things that apply to everyone, not just at the border — for example the Terrorism Act 2000 and Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. But again, in the border case — that's basically all going to be _after_ you are admitted to the UK.
