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Child Porn Suspect Jailed Indefinitely For Refusing To Decrypt Hard Drives (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A Philadelphia man suspected of possessing child pornography has been in jail for seven months and counting after being found in contempt of a court order demanding that he decrypt two password-protected hard drives. The suspect, a former Philadelphia Police Department sergeant, has not been charged with any child porn crimes. Instead, he remains indefinitely imprisoned in Philadelphia's Federal Detention Center for refusing to unlock two drives encrypted with Apple's FileVault software in a case that once again highlights the extent to which the authorities are going to crack encrypted devices. The man is to remain jailed "until such time that he fully complies" with the decryption order. The government successfully cited a 1789 law known as the All Writs Act to compel (PDF) the suspect to decrypt two hard drives it believes contain child pornography. The All Writs Act was the same law the Justice Department asserted in its legal battle with Apple.
Article 5. No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Article 6. Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
Article 9. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Article 10. Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.
Article 11.
(1) Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
(2) No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.
Source: http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/
"Brussels has effectively enacted curfew and everybody is fine with it"
as a belgian i must say this is the first i heard about that
probably right after the bombings there was some kind of curfew for a short period when they were still hunting down some suspects, but life is just returning to normal, as you would expect.
Here is an analysis of the topic. So far, the question has not been addressed by the supreme court, and other courts have issued mixed decisions.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You don't have to be a witness against yourself, but you do have to provide physical evidence. For example, if a fingerprint or blood was found at the crime scene, you can be compelled to give your fingerprint or blood to test for a match.
The purpose of the 5th amendment is to prevent situations where police can torture you, or harass you until you confess. That isn't really an issue in the case of DNA or a fingerprint, because the police can't harass your fingers or blood into confessing.
Even so, the courts are conservative, and won't force you to give evidence if it can be found some other way. For example, they can't force you to open a combination lock on a safe, because the police have the capability to crack the safe. So the court won't force you to do that.
In the case of an encrypted hard drive, there may be no other way to get the evidence other than the owner decrypting it. So how will the courts rule? I have no idea, it's a complicated case, and the use of the "all writs act" makes it even more complicated. As likely as not, the court will rule based on a strange technicality in order to avoid the heart of the problem.
(A person can be held indefinitely if they defy a court order, they will be in contempt of court. I think that is true in basically every jurisdiction in the world. The power of the law is heavy).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
IANAL and all that, but can't they hold someone in contempt indefinitely?
It is only legal to hold them in contempt if they ARE capable of complying with the order.
At such time as the person is physically or mentally incapable of complying with the order, for example, they don't have the information required, or it is not possible for them to perform as requested, they cannot be held in contempt.
A judge is also required to take into account the probability that further incarceration is likely to be conducive to the goal - holding someone in contempt of court is not a punitive measure, its a conducive measure, so if its unlikely to achieve the goal required then a judge is not supposed to continue holding someone in contempt.
If it's legal to own, then there is no legal recourse someone would have to remove pornographic pictures of themselves from somewhere.
If child pornography were decriminalized, the producer of the work would need to provide a model release signed by the actor's parent. Otherwise, the recourse would be revenge porn laws and trademark-like right of publicity laws.
No.
The definition of the word "produce" is important. If the evidence already exists (as encrypted data on the hard drive), then the court can compel someone to produce (deliver) it to the investigators.
The 5th Amendment protection is to intended to prevent the court from forcing confessions. To that effect, the court is not allowed to compel a defendant to produce (create) evidence against themselves that did not already exist.
As an analogy, the court cannot compel you to write a confession. If you already wrote one and put it in a safe, they can compel you to give them the combination to the safe.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.