Legal help and advices
Return to the index page
There are two levels of the protection against legal prosecution:
-
Without a link on the blog/forum referencing the hidden file embedded in images, adversary cannot detect that in images you share is
hidded some censored information.
-
Even if adversary found that you share stego images, he cannot start prosecution process, because you have 100% plausible
deniability that you didn't knew that there are any illegal information embedded in the images; it is totally absurd to start
litigation.
Few useful advices:
-
Always extract hidden files on the encrypted partition (or cryptocontainer). If your home will be searched, a presence of extracted
hidden files on the HDD will destroy plausible deniability defense model, therefore we recommend to use
TrueCrypt. In most countries you have rights to decline revealing password for
encrypted data, but in some states such as United Kingdom you may be forced to do this by law, therefore if you live in such country we suggest to
create a hidden partition and if forced, reveal password only for outer partition (which you can fill with legal files, such as personal
photos, documents, media etc), it is impossible to prove existence of the hidden partition.
-
If you have got a letter asking you to settle out of court by paying money compensation (for example from RIAA or MPAA), put it
into trash bin, in court you can always say that you have seeded (distributed) only legal photos and didn't knew about hidden files,
embedded in them, they will have absolute no chance to prove opposite (human eye cannot see the difference between ordinary and
stego images). Photo trackers also may feel absolute safe; before receiving a notice, they cannot to know about presence of
illicit file in the images.
-
For initial uploader, we recommend to add torrents to the photo tracker's website via TOR
(go to TOR download page, download Tor
Browser Bundle for Windows and run it). If adversary will get access to the photo tracker's logs, he may find initial uploader's IP
and if busted, person who have added torrent to the tracker first time can't tell that he didn't knew about illicit file,
embedded in the images. It is not necessary to seed images in the torrent client via TOR, because initial uploader in the p2p
network does not differ from seeder, therefore if caught he can always say that he didn't knew about hidden files in the images.