Slashdot Mirror
Judge Rules Man Cannot Be Forced To Decrypt HD
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "In Vermont, US Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier has ruled that forcing someone to divulge the password to decrypt their hard drive violates the 5th Amendment. Border guards testify that they saw child pornography on the defendant's laptop when the PC was on, but they made the mistake of turning it off and were unable to access it again because the drive was protected by PGP. Although prosecutors offered many ways to get around the 5th Amendment protections, the Judge would have none of that and quashed the grand jury subpoena requesting the defendant's PGP passphrase. A conviction is still likely because prosecutors have the testimony of the two border guards who saw the drive while it was open." The article stresses the potential importance of this ruling (which was issued last November but went unnoticed until now): "Especially if this ruling is appealed, US v. Boucher could become a landmark case. The question of whether a criminal defendant can be legally compelled to cough up his encryption passphrase remains an unsettled one, with law review articles for the last decade arguing the merits of either approach."
Update: 08/19 23:49 GMT by KD : Several readers have pointed out that this story in fact did not go unnoticed.
Update: 08/19 23:49 GMT by KD : Several readers have pointed out that this story in fact did not go unnoticed.
No one has witnessed anything that would have involved children, if you assume that "animation depicting" means drawings, and not movies. The word "depicting" suggests that it is not real.
If you assume these observations are correct, then you must be a Slashdot lawyer. Instead of assuming something, why don't you see what the legal definition of "depicting" is. Why don't you look at the transcript of the actual testimony, instead of paraphrasing a Slashdot blurb, and declaring this guy innocent?
This is just another episode of the Hans Reiser Slashdot Law forum deciding from web articles the injustices meted out on some hapless victim of our so-called corrupt judicial system.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
In other words, you hear a lot of lies and believe them because you are ignorant and want to believe them.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Glad to see the 5th amendment holding up.
I saw a quote, I think on one of the previous Slashdot stories about this case:
"For Soviet Russia's KGB, the amount of time required to crack a passphrase is inversely proportional to the temperature of the soldering iron shoved up the guy's ass."
Guy's lucky he didn't make his way to Gitmo.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
Oh, how I wish I had mod-points so I could mod you into oblivion.
You are a fucktard.
In a discussion about 5th amendment rights and preventing self incrimination, you effectively just called several thousand people "pedophile sympathizers".
I can't possibly think of anything more disingenuous and counter to an intelligent and rational society.
It's blind zealots like you that give the US a bad name and will lead to the further crumbling of our constitution and freedoms.
Congratulations Osama.
A lot of slashdotters want to be permitted to violate a number of laws, after all "they know better" (and ... benefit themselves from those crimes, but that has nothing to do with it at all), so obviously they side with the criminal.
And yes they have an excuse in this case. But that's for show. They don't want to be convicted for not buying their own entertainment, for not abiding by software licences they use (however they *do* want to force others to abide by the GPL, using financial and even criminal punishments for violations).