Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • March 16, 2018 6:34 PM

@ Ratio,

Phantom Secure should be held culpable for what the users of its services were doing.

There used to be rules about this to stop people who had been injured by a drunk/whatever going after the manufacture of the item that was used to cause the injury.

That is the law used to work on the principle of the “Directting Mind”. However whilst manufacturers can have deep pockets those with the –supposed– “directing mind” usually did not.

Thus the civil courts started chipping away at the rules. Now it apears that the criminal courts want to “follow the money” as well…

“The difference is this company was specifically-designed to aid international drug trafficking,”

That is going to be an interesting reach as it implies conspiracy, which in theory is easy to prove but in practice often not. Especially if the company set up business long prior to the criminal cartel purchesing “goods”.

What we don’t know is how many other customers there are and how long they have been purchasing Phantom Secure’s products and services.

Various people involved with prosecuting companies generaly “talk a good fight” but down the line they enter intobsome kind of agreement which involves a fine and a few words of attrician etc, then it’s back to business.

As a general rule a supplier of goods has absolutly no idea where they will end up or when. In part because the law alows for second hand sales and in part alows people to rent out most things.

With services it’s a little different, in the past supplying a service ment human contact thus the service provider would be aware that things were perhaps not ordinary. Courts still tend to follow that reasoning. Where the courts have trouble is “where service provison is blind” that is like the mail and phone services. To get around the problem the principle of “Common Service Provision” came about. Originally it only applied to government entities, but with comnercialisation licencing. The point is that most “common service provision” is nolonger licenced but just regulated.

If Phantom can establish they were in effect “blind” to the data etc their customers sent, then they were in effect a “common service provider” which would in effect kill off the case against them.

Thus the question of how would Ramos negate the alleged evidence from the RCMP agents. That may well be easier than many would expect “entrapment” is something many legal systems are rather more cautious about than the US.

There is also the question of where the “alledged” crimes happened. They may never have happened within the formal US jurisdiction, which raises another bunch of question marks

I suspect that there are apointiees in various federal entities that are not happy with this and want it to go away. In part the FCC and it’s changes to net neutrality may reflect back via the common carrier changes.

Further the judiciary has not been as favourable to FBI prosecutors in more recent times as they have in the past…

As normal insufficient information to make things less than guesswork, I’m not a betting man but if I were I think I’d spend the money on popcorn…