It's all very confusing so no point rushing to any conclusions.<p>The Register writes:<p><i>"the government says that Miranda was actually carrying a piece of paper with a decryption password written on it. This allowed the police to read at least some of the files he was carrying."</i> [1]<p>While Greenwald just tweeted:<p><i>"Anyone claiming that David Miranda was carrying a password that allowed access to documents is lying. UK itself says they can't access them."</i>[2]<p>[1] <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/30/snowden_journos_boyfriend_had_crypto_key_for_thumbdrive_files_written_down_cops/" rel="nofollow">http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/30/snowden_journos_boyf...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/373451644794449922" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/373451644794449922</a>
That makes no sense. If you can decrypt 20 gigabytes of a TC volume you can access the other 40 too.<p>There are few explanations<p>1. The 20 gigabytes in question were not encrypted (which coincidentally is the size of a windows installation)<p>2. The 75 files were temp files<p>3. They managed to open 60 gig container but could not access the hidden volume<p>The third option makes sense with the decryping passphrase being in possession of Miranda - the first 20 GB are a warning.
Reading the report at its face, it doesn't say the encrypted data was obtained.<p>It says:<p>1. Goode said the hard drive contained around 60 gigabytes of data<p>2. "of which only 20 have been accessed to date."<p>3. She said that she had been advised that the hard drive contains "approximately 58,000 UK documents which are highly classified in nature, to the highest level."<p>4. Goode said the process to decode the material was complex and that "so far only 75 documents have been reconstructed since the property was initially received."<p>Let's assume (as a possibility) that:<p>1. It's a 60GB hard drive
2. It has a 40GB Truecrypt partition
3. There are deleted files on the 20GB partition that were not securely erased<p>This theory does not explain everything, but might it be plausible?
"In her witness statement submitted to the British court on Friday, Detective Superintendent Caroline Goode, who said she was in charge of Scotland Yard's Snowden-related investigation, said that among materials officials had seized from Miranda while detaining him was an "external hard drive" containing data encrypted by a system called "True Crypt," which Goode said "renders the material extremely difficult to access."<p>Goode said the hard drive contained around 60 gigabytes of data, "of which only 20 have been accessed to date." She said that she had been advised that the hard drive contains "approximately 58,000 UK documents which are highly classified in nature, to the highest level."<p>Isn't this supposed to be very unlikely to happen when using TrueCrypt? Can someone explain what could have gone wrong in the process of storing this data?
A big thank-you to the HN mods for not rewriting this posts headline to match the article's. Although "UK asked N.Y. Times to destroy Snowden material" matches the main focus of the article, the part involve TrueCrypt is what makes it applicable to the HN audience.<p>So a big round of applause for not clobbering this article's rewritten headline - you're all called out far too often for doing negative work and deserve acknowledgement for doing good;-)
I'm disappointed in how Greenwald planned the whole thing. Did he really not expect this to happen - especially in UK? Why didn't he have Miranda delete the files as soon as he gave them to Laura Poitras or whatever he did with them in Germany.<p>Now, whatever Greenwald wants to release next needs to be done fast, before the governments prepare well crafted rebuttals to whatever he's releasing, because they'll know what he'll release next.