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US Judge Rules Defendant Can Be Forced To Decrypt Hard Drive
A Commentor writes "Perhaps to balance the good news with the Supreme Court ruling on GPS, a judge in Colorado has ordered a defendant to decrypt her hard drive. The government doesn't have the capability to break the PGP encryption, and 'the Fifth Amendment is not implicated by requiring production of the unencrypted contents' of the defendant's computer."
"I forgot."
I find it funny that a quick search on the subject yielded an article from the same site, with the opposite finding.
Article in 2007: Judge: Man can't be forced to divulge encryption passphrase
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9834495-38.html
Article in 2012: Judge: Americans can be forced to decrypt their laptops
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57364330-281/judge-americans-can-be-forced-to-decrypt-their-laptops/
I'm fine with them breaking your encryption if they have probable cause; however, forcing you to give the password does seem to have a pretty straight-forward logical path to incriminating yourself (Especially if you are guilty and a subsequent search will yield something on the device).
You've been reading this again, haven't you!
What's the problem with this? If the prosecution knows the defendant owns a pistol and is accusing the defendant of robbing a liquor store with a pistol, the prosecution is certainly within its rights to subpoena the defendant to produce the pistol so it can be tested against the three slugs pulled out of the counter clerk.
The defendant can claim the pistol doesn't exist (in which case the prosecution has to be able to prove it does), the defendant can claim it was lost or stolen, or ... etc. There are a ton of ways to prevent turning over the pistol. However, none of these ways invalidate the central fact, which is that the subpoena is valid and enforceable: if the prosecution can demonstrate you have the pistol, the judge will happily put you in jail until you turn it over to the prosecution.
You can be held in contempt of court and imprisoned indefinitely until you decide to cooperate. This is often used on journalists who refuse to reveal their sources.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
England already has laws that force suspects to decrypt their hard drives... but maybe you were ironically referring to that?
"The 5th amendment does not protect you from being required to provide subpoenaed materials. It just means you dont have to testify or speak..."
Very definitely incorrect. I looked into this when I first read about the second court case mentioned in TFA. The one about the guy at the border who had child pornography on his computer. TFA gives a woefully incomplete account of that case; there is almost no chance that it is anything like this one at all.
The court ruled that he had to provide the password to an encrypted area on his hard drive, because Customs had already seen some child pornography on his computer, in the encrypted portion of the drive. The decryption software was running at the time, so these files were open and 2 Customs agents were able to see them. But somehow the man then managed to turn off the computer so the files could no longer be accessed.
The key thing here is that the court did not want the password in order to perform a SEARCH. It was already known that there was illegal material there. That is a FAR different situation.
In its ruling, the court made this point very clearly: the government normally cannot force someone to provide an encryption password, in order to SEARCH for items or material that are only SUSPECTED to be there. That would constitute a clear violation of the 5th Amendment.
However, in that particular (and really very unusual) case, the government already knew that there was illegal material, and even where it was. And the court wanted that material for the trial. There could be no violation of the 5th Amendment in that particular situation the court ruled, because it amounted to seizing illegal materials that were already known to be there. Therefore it was not a "search" in any reasonable sense of the term, and the defendant was not supplying anything incriminating that was not already known. He was not "testifying against himself" in other words.
Other courts have made this VERY clear: except under very unusual circumstances, rendering your password up to authorities is most definitely "testifying against yourself", and falls under the 5th Amendment. They cannot demand that information in order to search for evidence that might incriminate you.
When I mentioned all this earlier, when this post still hadn't appeared yet, somebody (sjames) replied that this was "sophistry", to use his word, and that if the court really "knew" it was there, they would not have required that it be supplied to the court.
However, that in itself is sophistry. Apparently he was forgetting several things: (1) As long as the court is not violating the 5th amendment (and in THAT rare case it was not), it can order the material to be presented for pretty much any damned reason it pleases. I did not say it was "needed" by the court to obtain a conviction; I simply stated that it was ordered to be given up. (2) Considering that the court already had consistent and concurring testimony from 2 Customs agents, if they had committed perjury it would have been ridiculously easy to very that without much compromising the defendant's privacy, and any further intrusion could be immediately ended. So there was little danger to the defendant's rights. And most importantly, (3) I wasn't asking sjames to take my word for it; he can look up the damned court decision himself on Google, just like I did, and read about it for himself.