News from Ivan
New cell searches
The “scrutiny” of me, from the Prison Administration (and/or the investigating judge?), continues. More reprisals for my hunger strikes? Who knows…
In any case, on February 14 there was a third search of my cell (after those of December 6 and January 9). Around 7:30 pm the ERIS arrived with helmets, hoods and shields. There were about a dozen of them, one officer was holding papers in his hand, on the top I could see my picture. Our cell was the only one in this wing that was searched (but they had a dog in the corridors), two others were searched in another wing, I don’t know about the other buildings. There was the warden, Michael Merci, and the deputy warden watching, beyond the glass doors. As soon as they took me and my cellmate (who had been here in the building for only a week) out of the cell, we were handcuffed and taken to the shower room on the first floor for the usual strip search. We were locked in the showers for the two hours that the search of our cell lasted. They found a cell phone with its charger. On Tuesday 21 March, I went to the disciplinary board. As a punishment, for 30 days my ability to access the canteen is suspended.
On March 30, it was the same thing again. The ELACs arrive and the story restarts.
The investigation: hard disks decrypted
As far as the investigation is concerned, in recent months new entries have been added to the disclosure. The most significant one is that the police managed to gain access to my computers, even though they were encrypted. The one for work, on which Windows is installed, is encrypted with BitLocker. A previous report in the file says that they had already tried to access it while I was in police custody but had not succeeded. But in September the Brigade d’appui en téléphonie, cyber-investigation et analyse criminelle (BATCIAC) sent a copy of the hard disk to the SDAT. In the report, they only explain that they booted the computer with a bootable USB key and then used the software AccesData FTK imager 3.3.05 to copy the hard disk. But they don’t talk about the decryption itself.
My personal computer, running Ubuntu 18, is encrypted with LUKS (the password is more than twenty characters: letters, numbers, punctuation marks…). I couldn’t find any indication in the file about how they decrypted it, but in this case they also made a copy of the hard disk. There are even files that had been deleted and emails that had been downloaded with Thunderbird (and then deleted). They didn’t find anything that could be related to the arsons I’m charged with. But I think the very fact that they were able to access hard drives encrypted with supposedly unbreakable software should be made as widely known as possible.[1]
Mail and extended detention
My mail continues to be greatly slowed down (on average, I receive letters one and a half to two months after they are sent): the investigating judge reads all the letters that arrive and that I write. Four of my letters were photocopied and put into the file: two that I had written to people from Envolée, one addressed to Boris (the comrade from Bissau who is in the hospital after the fire in his cell at the prison in Nancy, in August 2021) and the one addressed to the Gare, near Bure, in which I explained that the complaint that the editor of the Est Républicain newspaper filed against the administrators of the site bureburebure.info was included in “my” disclosure, for having republished the claim from the arson of a car of the newspaper (an arson of which I am accused).
Otherwise, my preventive detention has been extended until mid-June.
I’m fine, I’m still in good spirits and I’m sorry I can’t be in the streets these days. A thought of solidarity for Alfredo (and for all the compas in prison).
Solidarity means attack! Long live anarchy!
Ivan April 8, 2023
1. ActforfreeTranslator’s Note: Passwords should have an entropy of at least 90 (7 diceware words). The password described has an entropy of approximately 51-64 (assuming it was 4-5 diceware words, it would have less entropy if the words were not random). LUKS used in Ubuntu 18 is configured in a way that is less resilient to brute-force attacks. LUKS should use LUKS2, and a KDF of argon2id. For more information, see here: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/66429.html
via: attaque
Translated by Act for freedom now!