Frankly, if I were in a place or doing activities where I thought a police raid was a significant possibility, I'd MUCH rather have something that would trigger video AND AUDIO recording from multiple cameras in the house, placed in locations where they wouldn't be "accidentally" knocked over or otherwise destroyed and with the data going offsite immediately via any of several channels (e.g. home network, home wifi, neighbor wifi, public/semipublic wifi (e.g. "xfinitywifi"), LTE phone).<p>Alternately, always have the recording going to something local, but trigger offsiting it with something like this and otherwise have a very limited timeframe for keeping it.<p>The other VERY VERY important piece of this I suspect would be notices posted at every possible entrance to the house, something like "Video and audio recording occur on these premises. By entering, you consent to this recording and to the use and public disclosure of these recordings. If you do not consent to these recording, use and disclosure policies, please call (xxx) xxx-xxxx and schedule an appointment." Perhaps I should call this a kick-through license - I'm not sure it'd stand up, but I suspect you'd have a pretty decent chance of that.<p>Of course, I'm boring, not inclined to activities likely to inspire either police interest or SWATing, and I live in a mostly-white townhouse community in the 'burbs. My most likely home invasion would be because "you are in a maze of twisty drives and townhouse units, all alike."
I really like his sort of thing, but realize that, like anti-forensics tools, there is a risk to having and using destructive anti-tamper triggers.<p>If the police actually think you're up to something, raid you, and your "cybernetic boobytrap" destroys your hundreds of GB of <i>actual</i> random data, they may still try and prove that you're a terrible person and destroyed evidence in court. Then it's up to a jury, and a prosecutor bent on making you look guilty as hell.<p>I'm not trying to dissuade exploration, but understand what can happen if you actually deploy this sort of system.
> SWATd is a daemon for running scripts when your house gets raided by the police (or broken into by criminals).<p>It's funny how the distinction seems blurry at times.
Not to be picky, just interested. What's the reason behind using a daemon instead of simply running sensor check scripts in Cron? Or even better, raise interrupt when sensor fails, so you don't have to wait 30s (in worst case).
IAALBIANYL, so I will leave whether or not this would be operationally useful to those smarter than me, but from a legal standpoint, one should be aware that operation of a system like this as far as the United States would likely result in additional charges for obstruction of justice[1].<p>It is by no means unusual for the government to fail in the prosecution of the original crime they investigated, but succeed in convicting a defendant for obstruction. (See, e.g. Martha Stewart[2]). In fact it is not at all impossible (though not likely) to imagine a scenario in which someone committed no crime, was running a utility like this, and was eventually charged with obstruction. Say I'm Brian Q. Krebs, some nice people on the Internet decide to swat[3] me confusing me with someone with a similar name[4], police enter my house, swatd deploys and ambitious and creative young prosecutor decides to charge me with a violation of 18 USC 1519. Might not succeed, but boy will he get some press.<p>As always, the best advice if you are going to engage in a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy is to make sure you have some goofy-reasoned memos from DOJ lawyers approving your activities[5] and Congress on call to provide you retroactive immunity[6].<p>[1] 18 U.S.C. 1519 (or 1001 or 1501, or 1510) - <a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1519" rel="nofollow">http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1519</a><p>[2] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Stewart#Stock_trading_case_and_conviction" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Stewart#Stock_trading_ca...</a><p>[3] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting</a><p>[4] <a href="http://krebsonsecurity.com/tag/swatting/" rel="nofollow">http://krebsonsecurity.com/tag/swatting/</a><p>[5] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_Memos#Letter_from_John_Yoo_to_Alberto_Gonzales" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_Memos#Letter_from_John_...</a><p>[6] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amnesty_law#United_States" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amnesty_law#United_States</a> or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Act#Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Act_of_1978_Amendments_Act_of_2008" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillan...</a>
Hi everyone, I'm the author of that software.<p>I really didn't want this to blow up. It's absolutely NOT a solution to getting raided by the police. While that was the original inspiration for writing the tool, I was half-joking when I wrote the README about it being a defense against law enforcement.<p>I've moved the code into a different branch and added a disclaimer to the README. The most important line of the disclaimer is: "If you need to rely on SWATd, you have already lost."
This is a really stupid thing to do.<p>Willful destruction of evidence is a criminal act in many cases, and even in cases where it isn't, judges can instruct juries to make adverse inferences.<p>If you're handling sensitive material, you should have a consistent policy/practice to periodically purge, destroy or deal with data. You're less likely to get into hot water over deleting data if its a long-standing process. If you are involved in a criminal scheme and the police are busting down the door, they have evidence already.<p>Previous jobs had me involved in alot of civil litigation from the IT side. Many really serious problems were avoided by having good deletion policy. The place that let employees squirrel away email for 20 years would either lose cases because of stupid employee chatter or win pyrrhic victories after spending thousands (or millions in one case) of dollars on discovery.
Thank you for sharing a clever script that has many uses!<p>However ...<p>Ideally, your computer should be secure against physical access and not need to run a script.<p>This is a solved problem in the intelligence and defense communities which have policies such as physical key storage, e.g. PIN enabled encrypted USBs, encrypted file systems, multifactor authentication and such to defeat forensic tools operated by an adversary.<p>Suppose you are a military or intelligence officer carrying around a laptop with secret stuff on it. How do you think that laptop is secured so that its safe even in the hands of an adversary.<p>Far more likely than a police raid, is the accidental trigger of the script, e.g. the house painter needs to move your server a bit to get to the wall behind it!
It's difficult to think of things you could watch that would only occur during a raid. The examples given: ethernet and wi-fi, both go down much more often than you would like to think. Usually it's only for microseconds, but if you have a program that happens to check right then, there goes your encryption keys.<p>A tweak to the code would be to make sure that the sensor stays in the fail state for a particular duration. Even a few seconds would get rid of a lot of the false positives.
I think you could accomplish a similar function using the proximity of a cell phone to a laptop (like this: <a href="http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/18684.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/18684.html</a>). If the script shuts the laptop down when it's too far from the phone, that's perfect for me.
Or well known as a dead man's switch.<p>Speaking tangentially, what is the current state of the art of homomorphic encryption? I found this: <a href="https://hcrypt.com/" rel="nofollow">https://hcrypt.com/</a> - Anyone try it yet?