| Sigh. Why does every landmark case involving online privacy have to involve incompetent, unsavory, or sometimes even downright despicable people (e.g. child pornographers) on the defense side? In order to force the legal system to take a serious look at the core issues (whether the Feds can compel a company to produce its SSL private keys, whether they can compel a man to produce the password to his TrueCrypt drive, etc.) instead of getting distracted by all sorts of procedural bullshit, the case needs to have a competent defendant and even more competent counsel who make no serious mistakes throughout the course of the trial. That's the only way we're going to get a clear, decisive precedent, because otherwise the procedural blunders will dominate the legal result. Levison's failure to contact the EFF or ACLU the moment he received the first pen/trap order has led us all to waste a lot of time and resources litigating mostly peripheral issues, and probably caused a lot more hardship for Levison himself than he ever needed to get into. Meanwhile, we still don't have a clear idea of what the U.S. legal system thinks about forcing the disclosure of SSL private keys. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, so maybe there are adequate explanations for why he thought it was a good idea to wave a middle finger in the face of the DOJ. But in the grand scheme of things in the battle for internet freedom, I think we just missed a golden opportunity to get the courts to tackle some serious constitutional issues. Just like in all those other contempt cases where TrueCrypt drive in question obvious contained CP, or all those other surveillance cases where the defendant was a heavy uploader. Assholes, pirates, and child pornographers have rights, of course, but they usually don't make effective crusaders. |