DOJ: We Can Force You To Decrypt That Laptop

Posted by samzenpus on Monday July 11, 2011 @03:49AM from the show-us-everything dept.

betterunixthanunix writes "A mortgage-fraud case may have widespread implications for criminals who use cryptography to hide evidence. The US Department of Justice is pushing for the defendant to be forced to decrypt her hard drive, claiming that if they cannot force such decryptions, law enforcement will be unable to gather important evidence. The defendant's lawyer and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have made the claim that forcing such a decryption would be a violation of the defendant's fifth amendment right not to self-incriminate. The prosecutor in the case has insisted that the defendant would not be forced to disclose her passphrase, but only to enter the passphrase into a computer to decrypt the drive."

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Search And Seizure Explained - They Took My Laptop by tdc_vga · 2011-07-11 03:54 · Score: 5, Informative

Here's a presentation discussing the issue of force password disclosures and laptops I gave at DefCon 17: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibQGWXfWc7c
Check the law and make up your own mind.
Re:I don't recall... by MaskedSlacker · 2011-07-11 05:25 · Score: 5, Informative

That pesky constitution is why. For that matter, the supreme court has already ruled on this issue. In the US you cannot be forced to give up a password. The DOJ can bitch all they want, but it's already a settled issue.