Unlocking the Fifth Amendment: Passwords and Encrypted Devices

Each year, law enforcement seizes thousands of electronic devices—smartphones, laptops, and notebooks—that it cannot open without the suspect’s password. Without this password, the information on the device sits completely scrambled behind a wall of encryption. Sometimes agents will be able to obtain the information by hacking, discovering copies of data on the cloud, or obtaining the password voluntarily from the suspects themselves. But when they cannot, may the government compel suspects to disclose or enter their password? This Article considers the Fifth Amendment protection against compelled disclosures of passwords—a question that has split and confused courts. It measures this right against the legal right of law enforcement, armed with a warrant, to search the device that it has validly seized. Encryption cases present the unique hybrid scenario that link and entangle the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. In a sense, this Article explores whose rights should prevail. This Article proposes a novel settlement that draws upon the best aspects of Fourth and Fifth Amendment law: the government can compel a suspect to decrypt only those files it already knows she possesses. This rule follows from existing Fifth Amendment case law and, as a corollary to the fundamental nature of strong encryption, also represents the best accommodation of law enforcement needs against individual privacy

Evaluating Web Search Result Summaries

The aim of our research is to produce and assess short summaries to aid users’ relevance judgements, for example for a search engine result page. In this paper we present our new metric for measuring summary quality based on representativeness and judgeability, and compare the summary quality of our system to that of Google. We discuss the basis for constructing our evaluation methodology in contrast to previous relevant open evaluations, arguing that the elements which make up an evaluation methodology: the tasks, data and metrics, are interdependent and the way in which they are combined is critical to the effectiveness of the methodology. The paper discusses the relationship between these three factors as implemented in our own work, as well as in SUMMAC/MUC/DUC

Dirichlet belief networks for topic structure learning

Recently, considerable research effort has been devoted to developing deep architectures for topic models to learn topic structures. Although several deep models have been proposed to learn better topic proportions of documents, how to leverage the benefits of deep structures for learning word distributions of topics has not yet been rigorously studied. Here we propose a new multi-layer generative process on word distributions of topics, where each layer consists of a set of topics and each topic is drawn from a mixture of the topics of the layer above. As the topics in all layers can be directly interpreted by words, the proposed model is able to discover interpretable topic hierarchies. As a self-contained module, our model can be flexibly adapted to different kinds of topic models to improve their modelling accuracy and interpretability. Extensive experiments on text corpora demonstrate the advantages of the proposed model.Comment: accepted in NIPS 201

PRECEPT:a framework for ethical digital forensics investigations

Purpose: Cyber-enabled crimes are on the increase, and law enforcement has had to expand many of their detecting activities into the digital domain. As such, the field of digital forensics has become far more sophisticated over the years and is now able to uncover even more evidence that can be used to support prosecution of cyber criminals in a court of law. Governments, too, have embraced the ability to track suspicious individuals in the online world. Forensics investigators are driven to gather data exhaustively, being under pressure to provide law enforcement with sufficient evidence to secure a conviction. Yet, there are concerns about the ethics and justice of untrammeled investigations on a number of levels. On an organizational level, unconstrained investigations could interfere with, and damage, the organization’s right to control the disclosure of their intellectual capital. On an individual level, those being investigated could easily have their legal privacy rights violated by forensics investigations. On a societal level, there might be a sense of injustice at the perceived inequality of current practice in this domain. This paper argues the need for a practical, ethically-grounded approach to digital forensic investigations, one that acknowledges and respects the privacy rights of individuals and the intellectual capital disclosure rights of organisations, as well as acknowledging the needs of law enforcement. We derive a set of ethical guidelines, then map these onto a forensics investigation framework. We subjected the framework to expert review in two stages, refining the framework after each stage. We conclude by proposing the refined ethically-grounded digital forensics investigation framework. Our treatise is primarily UK based, but the concepts presented here have international relevance and applicability.Design methodology: In this paper, the lens of justice theory is used to explore the tension that exists between the needs of digital forensic investigations into cybercrimes on the one hand, and, on the other, individuals’ rights to privacy and organizations’ rights to control intellectual capital disclosure.Findings: The investigation revealed a potential inequality between the practices of digital forensics investigators and the rights of other stakeholders. That being so, the need for a more ethically-informed approach to digital forensics investigations, as a remedy, is highlighted, and a framework proposed to provide this.Practical Implications: Our proposed ethically-informed framework for guiding digital forensics investigations suggest a way of re-establishing the equality of the stakeholders in this arena, and ensuring that the potential for a sense of injustice is reduced.Originality/value: Justice theory is used to highlight the difficulties in squaring the circle between the rights and expectations of all stakeholders in the digital forensics arena. The outcome is the forensics investigation guideline, PRECEpt: Privacy-Respecting EthiCal framEwork, which provides the basis for a re-aligning of the balance between the requirements and expectations of digital forensic investigators on the one hand, and individual and organizational expectations and rights, on the other

Mapping Large Scale Research Metadata to Linked Data: A Performance Comparison of HBase, CSV and XML

OpenAIRE, the Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe, comprises a database of all EC FP7 and H2020 funded research projects, including metadata of their results (publications and datasets). These data are stored in an HBase NoSQL database, post-processed, and exposed as HTML for human consumption, and as XML through a web service interface. As an intermediate format to facilitate statistical computations, CSV is generated internally. To interlink the OpenAIRE data with related data on the Web, we aim at exporting them as Linked Open Data (LOD). The LOD export is required to integrate into the overall data processing workflow, where derived data are regenerated from the base data every day. We thus faced the challenge of identifying the best-performing conversion approach.We evaluated the performances of creating LOD by a MapReduce job on top of HBase, by mapping the intermediate CSV files, and by mapping the XML output.Comment: Accepted in 0th Metadata and Semantics Research Conferenc

Self Incrimination and Cryptographic Keys

The Fifth Amendment commands that no person shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself. However, extending current judicial interpretations of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments too far may allow the government easy access even to private documents, making one\u27s diary and other documents accessible and admissible in court against their author. What the Court has taken away, technology has given. Modern cryptography can make it virtually impossible to decipher documents without the cryptographic key, thus making the availability of the contents of those documents depend on the availability of the key. This article examines the Fourth and Fifth Amendments\u27 protection against the compulsory production of the key and the scope of the Fifth Amendment immunity against compelled production. After analyzing these questions using prevailing Fourth and Fifth Amendment jurisprudence, I shall describe the advantages of a privacy-based approach in practical and constitutional terms