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You can trust us, we're the police

The courts have agreed that Police should hand over cloned copies of computers and electronic devices that were seized in the armed raids on the Kim Dotcom mansion back in 2012.

However, there is a very big caveat on the release of these devices.

Before he can get copies of the disk images taken from those computers, Kim will have to hand over the passwords.

Are you kidding me?

Despite the fact that the courts have ruled the seizures to be "unauthorised" (a word that applies when government or one of its agencies breaks the law -- if it were you or I the word would be "illegal") Kim has to provide authorities with the passwords required to decrypt the data on them before he can get copies back.

Hang on a minute here. Firstly, these items were taken without "authorisation" then their contents were unlawfully (another cop-out word) handed on to the FBI and now Kim can only get the data back if he plays ball with these crooks?

Now I'm no great fanboi of Kim Dotcom but I find that it beggars belief the way the courts are attempting to leverage the "unauthorised" and "unlawful" actions of police in order to extract passwords from him.

In a clever (albeit odd) move, the Court of Appeal has ruled that the cloned copies returned to KD must be free from encrypted material -- which means, I guess, that he won't get them back unless he's handed over the keys that allow the material to be decrypted in the first place.

WTF?

How can this be?

The stuff ought not to have been taken in the first place, it ought not to have been handed over to US authorities in the second place but now the courts are effectively demanding that the keys are handed over before KD can get this stuff back?

Of course the courts have made police promise (hand on hearts) that they will not disclose those decryption keys and will not hand them on to anyone else -- especially not agents of the USA.

Would *you* trust the very people who took your stuff illegally in the first place and then (also illegally) passed copies on to the USA?

Of course not -- you'd have to be a fool to do so.

What's more, for any judge to suggest at this stage that the police could be trusted to honour their promise shows a level of naivety beyond belief.

Could the reality be that the courts don't expect the police to keep their word and this is simply a ploy to get KD to hand over the keys so that the data on those drives can be decrypted and used in evidence against him?

Sadly, I can't help but think that this may be the true motivation.

And what would happen once the police broke their promise and acted in contempt of the court's ruling?

Well I suspect they'd get the same punishment that they received after they stole KD's stuff and illegally passed it on to the US in the first place -- a big fat NOTHING.

It seems that in New Zealand there are (as I've suggested before) three sets of laws. One for politicians, one for agencies of government and one for the rest of us.

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