The worries concerning the need for encryption to keep the Big Brother from spying over the private citizen have been cropping up from time to time rather frequently, but now a twist to the story usual story appeared.

A new a report entitled “The growing impact of full disk encryption on digital forensics” hopes to increase law enforcements agencies’ awareness to the downsides encryption may present when trying to track down criminal activity. The study which does highlight the obvious in a way provides several suggestions to handling this, as well as a fairly obvious moral dilemma that seems to change as one moves the frame around. The paper was picked up by ExtremeTech:

“The paper does go on to suggest some ways to ameliorate these issues, though: Better awareness at the evidence-gathering stage would help, but it also suggests “on-scene forensic acquisition” of data, which involves ripping unencrypted data from volatile, live memory (with the cryogenic RAM freezing technique, presumably).”

The researchers highlighted a number of other points as well, including the risks in turning off a device that potentially carries important data during transport and the self-destruction mechanisms that may be associated with hardware-level disk encryption.

The report shines new light on a different angle to the encryption story. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean there haven’t been plenty of examples going both ways. During the London riots protestors used BlackBerry’s built-in messenger and social media to spread “really inflammatory [and] inaccurate” propaganda. Despite of a local outcry RIM provided authorities with access to its network; in essence the main reason the Scotland Yard didn’t hit a break wall following this cyber-lead.

On the other hand, the U.S government embarked on an imitative to increase user awareness to the dangers of storing unencrypted data. To some extent, it’s probably not possible to avoid a certain degree of contradiction when it comes to privacy and encryption.