full-disclosure - Re: Disk wiping -- An alternate approach?

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Message-id: <4B5E7A06.18737.B0EF9B48@nick.virus-l.demon.co.uk>
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:13:42 +1300
From: Nick FitzGerald <nick@...us-l.demon.co.uk>
To: full-disclosure <full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk>
Subject: Re: Disk wiping -- An alternate approach?

I've resisted getting involved in this and suspect that this may be a 
misguided attempt to clarify (??) a few things, but...

Bipin Gautam wrote:

> Before: "From the prosecutor's perspective, everything your hard drive is yours"
> 
> I just proved : everything your hard drive is NOT NECESSARILY YOURS.

This need not matter.  In several (many, most and increasing) Western 
jurisdictions _just possessing_ certain kinds of material is a criminal 
offense.  This is typically child pornography and/or beastiality but 
often includes other more or less specific things.  For example, 
writing as I am from New Zealand right now, I would almost certainly be 
committing an indecency offense by including the words "golden" and 
"shower" run together into a single phrase in this Email.

Within such jurisdictions, the issue of "knowledgable possession" or 
"intent to possess" are technically irrelevant to the issue of "did you 
breach this law", for as written, the offence is "possession" (and/or 
production, etc, etc) with no elaboration.

> DOES THAT CHANGE ANYTHING? LOGIC MAYBE???

I guess to assess that, we have to first decide whether you know what 
you're talking about or not...

And have you not heard of "the Trojan Horse defense"?  Kinda the legal 
opposite of "the dog ate my homework" and already successfully used a 
few times.

Regards,

Nick FitzGerald

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