Skip to main content
Commonmark migration
Source Link

So I setup booby-traps that are designed to either:

 

A. Destroy any evidence I think they might look for,

So I setup booby-traps that are designed to either:

 

A. Destroy any evidence I think they might look for,

So I setup booby-traps that are designed to either:

A. Destroy any evidence I think they might look for,

Copy edited; great answer!
Source Link
feetwet
  • 21.9k
  • 13
  • 85
  • 177

People have covered the harm-to-people booby trapping at length, and that one's pretty straightforward anyway. I'm going to focus on another area:

People have covered the harm-to-people booby trapping at length, and that one's pretty straightforward anyway. I'm going to focus on another area: Destruction of documents

The answer is, yes, that is allowed -- but it must look, walk and quack like a reasonable, legitimate purpose that isn't just a sham to cause the side-effect of denying it to law enforcement.

For instance the FBI grabs my computer and goessays, "Oooh, you deleted myyour browser history!" And then I gosay, "Look in my crontab"crontab." They find a perl script that goes through the library/registry and deletes all browser history. There's that smoking gun! Gotcha!    Oh, wait. The script was created in 2004, last modified in 2015, and is flagged to run nightly. The last change to the crontab file is 17 months ago. Other browser settings are set to delete or not store cookies, and those config files have a last-change date 5 months ago. That paints a completely different picture: of ordinary privacy best-practices to override the default (promiscuous) behavior of browsers, and this person did not change those habits lately. This has nothing to do with the police investigation.

However you keep your daily working copy on a thumb drive in a self-destruct-rigged fire safe - an electrical signal destroys it safely. You have this rigged to destroy on any intrusion, and documents outside the safe show that you have made an (accurate) risk assessment that you're a target for thieves who may know you have a lot of Bitcoin, and the trap is clearly focused on intruders. The police set it off by accident. Again you are in the clear for "document destruction", since you can show you didn't destroy it to evade authorities, you destroyed it to deny it to thieves and thus retain control of your Bitcoin.

On the other hand, you may have less formal or unpermitted stuff - homebrew biodiesel refineries for 20 gallon batches are common enough, jury-rigged out of hot water heaters and settling tanks. You don't need to pull a permit for a thing like that, but you should be following normal safety standards.

If an incident happens, it'll get treated as an industrial accident -- and the liability and consequences will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. If a cop gets shocked by wiring in your biodiesel setup, they'll go straight to the Electrical Codes: was it a goobed-up mishmash of draped wires that the officer tripped over... or had the officer on the hunt for meth, opened up an obvious electrical box and found exactly what it says on the tin, which was nothing, but in electrical, "nothing" means "up to 600V"600V."

People have covered the harm-to-people booby trapping at length, and that one's pretty straightforward anyway. I'm going to focus on another area: Destruction of documents

The answer is, yes, that is allowed -- but it must look, walk and quack like a reasonable, legitimate purpose that isn't just a sham to cause the side-effect of denying it to law enforcement.

For instance the FBI grabs my computer and goes "Oooh, you deleted my browser history!" And then I go "Look in my crontab". They find a perl script that goes through the library/registry and deletes all browser history. There's that smoking gun! Gotcha!  Oh, wait. The script was created in 2004, last modified in 2015, and is flagged to run nightly. The last change to the crontab file is 17 months ago. Other browser settings are set to delete or not store cookies, and those config files have a last-change date 5 months ago. That paints a completely different picture: of ordinary privacy best-practices to override the default (promiscuous) behavior of browsers, and this person did not change those habits lately. This has nothing to do with the police investigation.

However you keep your daily working copy on a thumb drive in a self-destruct-rigged fire safe - an electrical signal destroys it safely. You have this rigged to destroy on any intrusion, and documents outside the safe show that you have made an (accurate) risk assessment that you're a target for thieves who may know you have a lot of Bitcoin, and the trap is clearly focused on intruders. The police set it off by accident. Again you are in the clear for "document destruction", since you can show you didn't destroy it to evade authorities, you destroyed it to deny it to thieves and thus retain control of your Bitcoin.

On the other hand, you may have less formal or unpermitted stuff - homebrew biodiesel refineries for 20 gallon batches are common enough, jury-rigged out of hot water heaters and settling tanks. You don't need to pull a permit for a thing like that, but you should be following normal safety standards.

If an incident happens, it'll get treated as an industrial accident -- and the liability and consequences will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. If a cop gets shocked by wiring in your biodiesel setup, they'll go straight to the Electrical Codes: was it a goobed-up mishmash of draped wires that the officer tripped over... or had the officer on the hunt for meth, opened up an obvious electrical box and found exactly what it says on the tin, which was nothing, but in electrical, "nothing" means "up to 600V".

People have covered the harm-to-people booby trapping at length, and that one's pretty straightforward anyway. I'm going to focus on another area:

Destruction of documents

The answer is, yes, that is allowed but it must look, walk and quack like a reasonable, legitimate purpose that isn't just a sham to cause the side-effect of denying it to law enforcement.

For instance the FBI grabs my computer and says, "Oooh, you deleted your browser history!" And then I say, "Look in my crontab." They find a perl script that goes through the library/registry and deletes all browser history. There's that smoking gun! Gotcha!   Oh, wait. The script was created in 2004, last modified in 2015, and is flagged to run nightly. The last change to the crontab file is 17 months ago. Other browser settings are set to delete or not store cookies, and those config files have a last-change date 5 months ago. That paints a completely different picture: of ordinary privacy best-practices to override the default (promiscuous) behavior of browsers, and this person did not change those habits lately. This has nothing to do with the police investigation.

However you keep your daily working copy on a thumb drive in a self-destruct-rigged fire safe an electrical signal destroys it safely. You have this rigged to destroy on any intrusion, and documents outside the safe show that you have made an (accurate) risk assessment that you're a target for thieves who may know you have a lot of Bitcoin, and the trap is clearly focused on intruders. The police set it off by accident. Again you are in the clear for "document destruction", since you can show you didn't destroy it to evade authorities, you destroyed it to deny it to thieves and thus retain control of your Bitcoin.

On the other hand, you may have less formal or unpermitted stuff homebrew biodiesel refineries for 20 gallon batches are common enough, jury-rigged out of hot water heaters and settling tanks. You don't need to pull a permit for a thing like that, but you should be following normal safety standards.

If an incident happens, it'll get treated as an industrial accident and the liability and consequences will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. If a cop gets shocked by wiring in your biodiesel setup, they'll go straight to the Electrical Codes: was it a goobed-up mishmash of draped wires that the officer tripped over... or had the officer on the hunt for meth, opened up an obvious electrical box and found exactly what it says on the tin, which was nothing, but in electrical, "nothing" means "up to 600V."

Source Link

People have covered the harm-to-people booby trapping at length, and that one's pretty straightforward anyway. I'm going to focus on another area: Destruction of documents

I worked for a Big-Data firm when the Sarbanes-Oxley Act landed.

So I setup booby-traps that are designed to either:

A. Destroy any evidence I think they might look for,

What they're going to look for here is why you are destroying the data. If you set it up for the purpose of keeping it away from law enforcement, that is prima facie illegal, you are correct. And this is the dilemma faced by corporations as Sarbanes-Oxley passed. But what if you destroy data for another purpose?

The answer is, yes, that is allowed -- but it must look, walk and quack like a reasonable, legitimate purpose that isn't just a sham to cause the side-effect of denying it to law enforcement.

An example: Time-aged deletion

For instance the FBI grabs my computer and goes "Oooh, you deleted my browser history!" And then I go "Look in my crontab". They find a perl script that goes through the library/registry and deletes all browser history. There's that smoking gun! Gotcha! Oh, wait. The script was created in 2004, last modified in 2015, and is flagged to run nightly. The last change to the crontab file is 17 months ago. Other browser settings are set to delete or not store cookies, and those config files have a last-change date 5 months ago. That paints a completely different picture: of ordinary privacy best-practices to override the default (promiscuous) behavior of browsers, and this person did not change those habits lately. This has nothing to do with the police investigation.

That is exactly what corporations figured out after contemplating the meaning of Sarbanes-Oxley. They realized that if you had a parade of people in FBI jackets hauling Bankers Boxes out of your building, it did not help your case if some of those boxes were labeled 1974, where now they're searching for misdeeds of three managements prior to yours. This is where data retention policies entered the picture. If you burned all files prior to 2014 as the FBI was pulling up, that was a felony. But if you had a policy to routinely destroy files over 6 years old, and that policy was in place and acted upon long before any legal inquiry, then you were in the clear.

Another example: event-triggered deletion

Practically speaking it's not hard to rig thermite to destroy evidence without endangering anyone not in close proximity. But then, destruction of evidence is a crime...

So far, I've only talked about time/age. But a reasonable reason for other destruction is also routine non-police threats. Say you have a significant hoard of Bitcoins (that is, strings of cryptographic data that act like money to the first person who uses it). Your master store is on a laptop, in a safe, in a cave, on the moon at a secure Iron Mountain facility that happens to be in a non-extradition state.

However you keep your daily working copy on a thumb drive in a self-destruct-rigged fire safe - an electrical signal destroys it safely. You have this rigged to destroy on any intrusion, and documents outside the safe show that you have made an (accurate) risk assessment that you're a target for thieves who may know you have a lot of Bitcoin, and the trap is clearly focused on intruders. The police set it off by accident. Again you are in the clear for "document destruction", since you can show you didn't destroy it to evade authorities, you destroyed it to deny it to thieves and thus retain control of your Bitcoin.

They'll still charge you (why not?) but you'll easily defend

Naturally, the police investigators will only think about themselves. They will assume correlation is causality, and "You rigged it to destroy because you saw us coming". You will point out that the protection systems are years old, and they will retort that you saw them coming years ago because that's when you planned to commit crimes.

This is where you defend that your defenses are perfectly reasonable for a law-abiding citizen in your position. That's easy for the corporate deletion policy; you simply explain that storing old records is unprofitable, and absent any expected litigation, why do so?

In the case of Bitcoin, you'd need to overcome the prosecution's propaganda that only criminals use Bitcoin and that your backup copy being in a non-extradition state means something: and show that you had perfectly ordinary and legitimate reasons to use it.

The Hazmat factory

One analogy that might illuminate this is to consider a hazmat factory: It is secured, it has warnings, and if police barge in and start tossing things without adequate protection they could be injured or killed.

That's a different deal. You intersect with a bajillion safety, OSHA, UL, various Codes, permitting, licensing and inspection issues, almost anytime you have plant that is not inherently safe.

The problem is, this safety dance is a 2-part dance. The cops have an obligation to be careful, sensible and not defeat the safety protections that Code calls for, i.e. if they see a "Danger Confined Space" sign they are expected to go find out what that means before charging in there and having this happen.

But the other side of the coin is, you are obligated to make a reasonable effort to comply with Code and safety standard practices. That sign had better be there, unless it's a hazard which is obvious to anyone in the trade. If they insist on going into a ballast tank on your ship or a thing that is obviously a grain silo... well yeah, that's on them. It's not a booby trap for obviously-dangerous things to be dangerous.

On the other hand, you may have less formal or unpermitted stuff - homebrew biodiesel refineries for 20 gallon batches are common enough, jury-rigged out of hot water heaters and settling tanks. You don't need to pull a permit for a thing like that, but you should be following normal safety standards.

If an incident happens, it'll get treated as an industrial accident -- and the liability and consequences will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. If a cop gets shocked by wiring in your biodiesel setup, they'll go straight to the Electrical Codes: was it a goobed-up mishmash of draped wires that the officer tripped over... or had the officer on the hunt for meth, opened up an obvious electrical box and found exactly what it says on the tin, which was nothing, but in electrical, "nothing" means "up to 600V".

Act like a desperado, get treated like one.

[to the meth lab] They don't say, "Please render your lab safe for us to search," and I don't think they say, "We got hurt raiding your lab, so that's on you."

The second one, I cover above. the vast, vast majority of meth labs are hinkle-dinkle safety fiascoes, where the lab is mortally dangerous to the operator nevermind the police. In that case, yeah, the operator is liable for any casualty.

But the cops raiding Gus Fring's lab would know to expect a tip-top, button-up operation where there might be booby traps, but at least the lab equipment isn't going to kill them. Let's think about that reputation thing.

Obviously in a nuclear power plant, they don't give licenses to cheeseheads. Cops can expect on-site security to act lawfully, and that any resistance to their demands will be reasonable and appropriate for the safety of community, plant, workers and police. So when they ask to see the reactor core, security contacts the control room, the control room says "unable" and security explains the danger, and everyone treats that as reasonable. If special access arrangements need to be made, the police, power grid operators and plant management have a sit-down and figure out how to approach that safely without blacking out 5 states or irradiating 3 counties. That is possible when you have actors with a reputation for reasonability.

Contrast with the lone wing-nut you mentioned, who is merely presumed to have set all manner of booby traps, and the sheriff presumes a raid will result in casualty. That person's reputation didn't get that way on its own.

The hypothetical "you" in this question is cavalier and indifferent about intent to maim on purpose. Assuming that "your" public mannerisms are comparable, you will also be casting a similar reputation. And that will cause police to act accordingly.