Deniability

[Jerome Baum]

"Robert J. Hansen" <rjh at sixdemonbag.org> writes:

> On Tue, 22 Mar 2011 14:37:16 +0000, Jerome Baum <jerome at jeromebaum.com>
> wrote:
>> Part thought  experiment, part practical  usage. I was thinking  more in
>> terms of  a German court  asking me to  turn over evidence --  but then,
>> there still might  be a lead pipe involved outside the  scope of a court
>> case.
>
> The amount of lead pipe a court can swing at you in many ways exceeds the
> amount of lead pipe organized crime can throw at you.  Let's do this
> thought experiment again, but this time with a zealous prosecutor who is
> sincerely doing what she believes to be her job.  Further, assume you have
> a deniable cryptosystem: you can't deny you received the message, but you
> can neither prove nor disprove having the ability to read it.
>
> Alice and Bob are plotting a heinous crime -- terrorism, narcotics
> trafficking, child exploitation, whatever.  They know their communications
> are being monitored and they are using a deniable cryptosystem.  They have
> also made plans for what to do if either of them ever gets arrested: they
> will do their best to incriminate someone else, so that the surviving
> conspirator will have time to go to ground and continue their plans of
> skulduggery.
>
> Alice gets picked up by the cops.  Paula Prosecutor interrogates her. 
> Alice says, "my co-conspirator was Jerome Baum."  This is a lie, of course,
> but all Alice needs to do is give the police someone to chase after for a
> few days while Bob goes into hiding.  Alice has sent you some innocuous
> messages through a deniable system in order to make you a good candidate
> for being made their patsy.

What stops her from sending me  real messages with this kind of content?
Even  non-encrypted? I  could reply  "I don't  know what  you're talking
about", but how  does the prosecutor care? The only way  I could get out
of it is to show I don't have any connection with Alice, but there is no
way I could ever do that -- as Sven mention off-list, the mere existence
of deniable systems gives me this danger.

In fact the existence of criminals  gives me the danger of being accused
-- it does not make deniable systems a problem.

Also, when did Alice turn evil? :)

-- 
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