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Defendant Ordered To Decrypt Laptop Claims She Had Forgotten Password
wiedzmin writes "A Colorado woman that was ordered by a federal judge to decrypt her laptop hard-drive for police last month, appears to have forgotten her password. If she does not remember the password by month's end, as ordered, she could be held in contempt and jailed until she complies. It appears that bad memory is now a federal offense."
The article clarifies that her lawyer stated she may have forgotten the password; they haven't offered that as a defense in court yet.
Lie detector tests are inadmissable in any sensible court in the world.
Being a smartarse can still end up with you in jail. The letter of the law says that you were required to provide the password and didn't. The excuse doesn't matter by that point, or they wouldn't have used that law against you anyway.
The fact is: They think you had the password, for good reason, "beyond reasonable doubt". They've ordered you to provide it. You failing to provide it when ordered is, in the US and UK I believe, an offence. Thus you will go to jail. Maybe not for as long as the evidence on that device would have meant, but long enough that you don't "get away" if you were trying to hide something.
The law is enforced by humans. If those humans think you have the key and don't believe your excuses, the letter of the law says they can jail you. You can argue it, of course, but that takes years. Being a smartarse doesn't help you at all.
..when I tell the judge that I got my passkey from 10 online password generators --- and I gave them all the 10 urls - hey, I am not hiding anything from them and the onus is for them to figure out the randomness of the 10 password generators and to reconstruct the passkey from whatever they can come up with
No, the judge will tell you to give him the passphrase or you will be jailed until you do. The fact you can't isn't an excuse because you can't prove that you don't know it.
Innocent until proven guilty is a thing from a different age.