On Wednesday, November 20, 2002, at 12:49 PM, dmolnar wrote:
From my reading of tradecraft, as practiced by SAVAK, MOSSAD, GRU, etc., there is rarely anything to be gained by letting the target of torture survive. If he or she survives, she screams to the newspapers, "60 Minutes," etc.On Wed, 20 Nov 2002, Tyler Durden wrote:to have a big jpg of a hand with middle finger extended...) More than this,The question I've seen asked about this is then -- how do you get them to
they will have unknowingly destroyed the real data. (Perhaps a 3rd key is
needed that DOESN'T destroy the original data, just 'hides' it a la
Rubberhose.)
stop beating you? If they know you might have some number of duress keys,
one of which might undetectably hide the data, what stops them from
beating you until
1) you give them a key that shows them what they want to see
2) you die
Maybe this isn't that different from the ordinary unencrypted case, where
if they don't find it on your HD they can accuse you of burying disks in
the backyard or something. Or is the goal protecting the data and not
protecting your life?
And torturing a person to death maximizes the chances that a "later" confession will undo the earlier confession(s).
To the torturer, once the target has confessed, crank up the heat some more. More shocks to the genitals, more fingers cut off, another child raped and executed before her eyes, another eyeball removed, etc., then the process _must_ continue.
Once the target has actually died--not counting times brought back from clinical death with medical methods--then the "Total Information Awareness" (TM, DARPA) engineers can presumably say "We've gotten all we can get."
The United States draws heavily on Israel for torture methods, as their methods come from some of the best torturers the world has ever seen, their teachers at Auschwitz and Berlin Central.
--Tim May
"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." -- Nietzsche
