"At approximately 1:30p.m. eDT on August 2, 2013, Mr. Levison gave the FBI a printout of what he represented to be the encryption keys needed to operate the penregister. This printout, in what appears to be 4-point type, consists of 11 pages of largely illegible characters.
Moreover, each of the five encryption keys contains 512 individual characters - or a total of 2560 characters. To make use of these keys, the FBI would have to manually input all 2560 characters, and one incorrect keystroke in this laborious process would render the FBI collection system incapable of collecting decrypted data."
> To make use of these keys, the FBI would have to manually input all 2560 characters...
My reaction to that was "oh boo hoo".
When people my age were kids (get off my lawn) we used to type pages of raw hexadecimal from the back of magazines into a machine prompt. We didn't cry about it, we were just careful.
I can't find a hexadecimal example at the moment, but look at some of these TRS-80 programs (pp. 110-111, 143) which have multiple pages of data/digits to transcribe:
And also... C64 programs. They were manually typed in by 10 year old kids. The programs were printed in the computer magazines (early 80s) that dealt specifically with C64's. These programs were far more than 2560 characters (in some cases).
If young, interested kids can do it, I'd hope that a nation state could figure it out.
Yep, I remember doing that with an Apple II back in '79 to get a simple lunar lander game. The process took more than a day, with two friends to help double check the values as we copied everything over. When it ran, and worked, we thought we were gods!
Yeah, in the grand scheme of things it's easier to get a few people to type that in (it's parallelizable, after all) than to wait for another court order. Though I'd still have brought it to the judge's attention as this is like the dictionary definition of "contempt of court". If someone tried to be GPL-compliant in this fashion they'd be laughed off the mailing list.
Keep reading: a couple of days later, he was then forced to send them in digital format under penalty of $5000 per day after the new deadline. So yeah, contempt was clearly detected, if not explicitly mentioned... your justice system works very quickly when it wants to.
Oh, I knew had presented it to the attention of the court, I was agreeing with their course of action in that regard bringing it to the judge's attention. A couple of days later is still too long of a wait though.
4 people can get this data entry done in an hour. One person reads out loud while the other person types and confirms each character. The second team does exactly the same work enabling a diff on the completed work to quickly find errors once everything is done. One character per second isn't unreasonable, so that's less than an hour. Or the same team does it twice in 2 hours.
It's not a big deal though. They subsequently specifically asked him to put it on a CD in PEM format and deliver it by 5 that day or be faced $5000 fine per day or something like that.
Single sided, double-spaced, abstract, appendices, title page, dedication page, headers, footers... still doesn't seem to be enough. Maybe the numbers were in Roman numerals?
They were to turn over the keys and all information required to decrypt everything. Presumably, they wrote a LOT of 4pt boilerplate on how to use the keys for decryption.
Moreover, each of the five encryption keys contains 512 individual characters - or a total of 2560 characters. To make use of these keys, the FBI would have to manually input all 2560 characters, and one incorrect keystroke in this laborious process would render the FBI collection system incapable of collecting decrypted data."