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Comment by lentil_soup

9 hours ago

> you may have to think both about protecting your data by technical means, and about not angering the agents more than you plan to

That's the same problem with technical solutions to crime.

I come from a very dangerous city and I used to have a car that needed a PIN to work. You could turn then engine on and drive but after a minute if you didn't input the PIN it would turn off without warning and start blasting the alarm. The idea being that if the car was stolen the thief would be stranded not far from home unsure about what's happening. Great technical solution but it ignores that a lot of the time the car is stolen with you in it (in a kidnapping, for example). Having the car shutoff in the middle of a highway next to a panicking guy with a gun and trying to remember a PIN is not a situation you want to be in, so I just had the PIN number written down on the dashboard, which worked very well when I was eventually kidnapped and just pointed at the piece of paper with the number.

26 comments

lentil_soup

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imglorp  7 hours ago

In phone terms, that's the $5 wrench problem. The elaborate tech is not relevant if you can be simply coerced somehow to bypass it.

Again in phone terms, maybe bring a blank phone through that border.

  • leonidasrup  2 hours ago

    Coercion was the reason from start, it's explained in the article.

    "A motion filed by his defense argues the interrogation focused on child sexual abuse material as a pretext for investigating his connections to the protest movement."

    So the message was simple: don't protest and you will be not harassed.

deltoidmaximus  6 hours ago

And there's the problem that if the PIN or worse a biometric version of this becomes remotely well known you've now created an incentive for a car thief to kidnap people even if they only want the car.

  • TeMPOraL  4 hours ago

    Or anything else you can't easily transfer. I can't help but point at passkeys in particular (or 2FA in general).

    A variant of this is the well-known scene from a previous century's movie involving extracting an eye to bypass retinal scanner.

  • nilamo  3 hours ago

    Like when fingerprint readers were added to car doors in the 90s, and carjackers started cutting fingers off to get away...

    • pinkyboy  2 hours ago

      That is a largely incorrect statement that is loosely based on a single incident, not a trend.

      The single incident was an individual in Malaysia who added an after-market finger-print based engine immobilizer to his car in 2005. The attackers threatened the individual with machetes, so that he would put his finger on the sensor, and then drove off with him in the car. The attackers later cut off his finger believing it would let them restart it without him present.