The ongoing Anglo investigation

[RMCF]

I cannot believe that the authorities investigating this have been having trouble accessing potentially important files because they were password protected.

[broken link removed]

Thats fair enough that they were protected in the 1st place, they were, after all, financial documents involving a lot of money.

But it was this line that really annoyed me:

The judge was told that the inquiry has been delayed by the fact Anglo does not have the passwords necessary to access some specific password protected or encrypted documents and the failure of certain former staff members to hand these passwords over.

Surely there must be some way that people can be forced to reveal passwords? Is there not a law about obstruction of justice?

Either way, it has just doubled my desire to see people behind bars for this debacle.

 

[Complainer]

There are free tools available to hack MS Word/Excel document passwords.

 

[z107]

It depends on the way the files were encrypted.

If I was doing something illegal, I wound want some kind of public key encryption, where a decoy key can be given that deletes the data.

I wonder what method these people used?

 

[Towger]

Stick the files up on the internet and they will soon be decrypted, they dont even need to offer an award. The Kudos value would be more than enough.

 

[DB74]

I'm sure Wikileaks would find someone to decrypt them soon enough

 

[duchalla]

Surely there must be some way that people can be forced to reveal passwords?

There is...waterboarding... They wouldnt be long coughing up passwords if they had that for couple of hours. These guys are the fellas who've brought the country to its knees, lowest of the low...

 

[The_Banker]

Not making excuses for people in Anglo but if you are gone from an organisation for a long time it might a bit hard to remember a specific password?
Unless they are using a specific encryption tool and the password is stored somewhere.

I wouldn't rule out the possibility that the investigators haven't proceeded all that far in there investigations and this is an easy "blaming option" to hide there lack of progress as to be honest any documents that are password protected can be opened with a little bit of "honest endeavour".