Physical Security: Is booby trapping legal?

A friend and I were hanging around work one day, it was kinda slow and we were talking about the big RIAA thingy (them sezing your computers and such). Joking around, we made up an idea on how to protect yourself from getting convicted by the RIAA. Booby trap your box so that no information is usable. We came up with two methods.

1. Would involve blowing up the computer with c4 or somehting if the case was opened the wrong way(there trying to get at hardrives).

2. Would involve injecting acid into the hard drive unit to destroy the platters, making the drives unusable. Would either be tripped by entering the wrong password 3 times, or opening the case the wrong way.


To detect opening the case the wrong way we were thinking of either a special hidden screw to disable the booby trap, or detecting which order case screws are removed, wrong order triggers device.

The uses of such devices would probably be more wide spread then just protecting downloaded MP3's and such. Could be used for sensitive military data, or terrorists computers.


My qeustion is would they be legal, or illegal and why?

My opinion is that it is my property, and I should be able to do with it what I want (ie. booby trapping).

Secondly I havn't seen any car alarms that electracute the person stealing the car either?

What do you people think?

DeafLamb
I guess the real question is,

I highly doubt it's legal for US Citizens. The FBI wouldn't want to risk blowing themselves up with a hacker's computer. But i'm sure hte military doesn't follow the same rules as everyone else.

I would say that it is illegal. If some agency was coming to confescate(sp?) your hd then they would have a warrant and would be able to legally take your hd from you. I don't think that they would be too happy if the harddrive was ruined in the process of confescating it. I think that since for this to happen in the first place you would already have to be in trouble, and by doing this you would just get yourself into a whole heck of a lot more trouble.
Just my 2 cents.

You are joking, right?

I had a pretty good idea that it would be illegal, but would it still be illegal if it wasn't physical damage? What if you had software on your computer designed to delete certain files if somone guessed the wrong password a certain number of times?

I think that would be legal. (software booby trapping)

But what draws the line, why is software booy trapping of ones personal property legal where physical would not.

In one case your detroying your own data (why, I don't know) and in the other your are physically harming someone. Seems fairly simple to me.

Am I missing something?

Yes, I know the one with C4 would harm someone so lets throw that out. Lets say you physically destroy the harddrives platters by injecting the drive with acid. The case for the drive is strong enough so the acid can't eat through that, therefore being safe to handle. No physical damage to persons, just to the platters of the drive. Would this be considered illegal?

DeafLamb

No, it wouldn't be illegal but it does seem a little bit odd.

Are you going to develop this technology, because there are far more serious things to spend time and money on like finding the flow rate of ketchup.... or something. Maybe trying to find out if you can get a tan by moonlight.

:thumbsup:

Usually if something like that is going to happen you will probably know it is coming and you can just destroy the drive before they get there. Or hide it very well because chances are they will find it. I would go with software and have it delete certain files and overwrite them many times if the wrong password is entered. This seems like kindof a theoretical question if you ask me. Main thing is don't do anything where you would have to destroy your harddrive or data on it. If you just want to be safe from normal people have it lock them out of the computer after 3 incorrect passwords or something. What you are talking about is overkill.

No, I work in retail sales currently, If you have ever you know how boring it can get dealing with customers who have no fu**ing clue what they want. Basically it was just a brain fart taht I found kind of interesting. Personally I would rather jump out of a plane that develop this technology. :) Thanks for your opinions though.

p.s. I'm serious about the jumping thing... Blue Skies :)

DeafLamb

How about not doing anything wrong in the first place and not giving the FBI a reason to come seize your equipment.. Sounds alot easier to me. ( and your hard drive) :)