File this evening under "lost to the XBox". I've spent pretty much all evening playing season two of 1 vs 100. In a nutshell, it's a pubquiz on your XBox. I wasn't too hot on the actual 1 vs 100 section, but on the extended play afterwards, I did OK. At one point I was fifth of around twelve thousand players, which is nice, with something daft like a thirty question streak of correct answers. And then it all fell apart and I ended up outside the top ten. But still in the top one hundred though, which is nice.

Do you have any encrypted files on your computer? I do. I have truecrypt containers, some truecrypt encrypted USB hard drives, and encrypted containers and devices on my USB flash drives on my keyring. Or, looking at it from a different angle, I'm carrying a potential prison sentence around with me every day. Yup, RIPA has been used to lock someone away for refusing to hand over their encryption keys.

Apart from the obvious (this law is bloody stupid), one of the things in this case that worries me most (if accurate, pinch of salt and all that) is he following passage:

In his final police interview, CTC officers suggested JFL's refusal to decrypt the files or give them his keys would lead to suspicion he was a terrorist or paedophile.
"There could be child pornography, there could be bomb-making recipes," said one detective.
"Unless you tell us we're never gonna know... What is anybody gonna think?"

As one of the commenters on that story on the register put it:

Let's put some alternative "There could be"s...
"There could be spreadsheets with his household budget calculations. There could be pictures from his last holiday in Scarborough."
Not so impressive now, is it?

No, it really isn't so impressive. What it is, though, is something which gives me a genuinely sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. The immediate assumption that because he has some encrypted data, he is either a terrorist or a paedophile. Now I'm not naive enough to think that the world is all sweetness and light, and yes, I am probably guilty of jumping to conclusions about people's intent (for example, if there is a gang of teens with their hoods up, hiding behind a pillar near the door to my block of flats, I'll probably walk around the to the door on the other side of the building*), but if you're going to be passing sentence on somebody, and sending them to jail, then surely they shouldn't be locked away for (what could possibly be) a case of poor memory and a forgotten password? Shouldn't this chap have only been banged up for missing his bail?

Does this mean that I could (via an open wifi network) email somebody a truecrypt container file, with the message "Here's the plans and supplier details for that dirty bomb we talked about", then call the counter terrorism police, and get them locked away, because they will be unable to decrypt the file? Or could my terrorist cohorts and I simply exchange a zip file containing lots of truecrypt files named image_001.JPG, image_002.JPG, etc., and when anybody wants to look at them, we can exclaim "These are just my holiday photos from Scarborough, officer. It looks like the file has become corrupted while it was being emailed. I told him not to keep that hard drive on top of his subwoofer with the big speaker in it, the dozy fool". I wish I could say that was pre-meditated, but it just flowed from my fingers.

Hmm, there seems to be a lot of helicopters out tonight, ah, must go, there's someone knocking at the door, seems to be a bit of a kerfuffle actually, he's awfully shouty.

Just comin9NU£D*(£QCP)*(DK<£_P(*£N{@*J£"*NO CARRIER...