I had many discussions years ago with a colleague about cryptography and coding theory. His analogy about cryptography and the right of law enforcement to obtain the passphrase was in the end asking them to interpret your language for them, which you are not required to do.
Whistling Analogy Imagine you and I want to speak with each other in a way others do not understand. We create a whistling language where whistles of certain lengths and combinations will represent the codeset of our language. We both agree to this and can communicate effectively, albeit not very much information, when we are both within earshot of each other. Seeing as how we were both Electrical Engineers, we built a modem (I said this was many years ago) that transmits this whistling language over a phone line but at a much higher speed. Now the government certainly can get a wiretap (and as we've learned AT&T has been providing this all along) and record all the whistles, but they can never force us to teach them what the code means.
To make this analogy more relevant to this case - the whistles are bits (0 and 1) and the hard drive is just the storage mechanism that I am using for communicating with myself at a later time. The encryption is still the language that needs to be interpreted. The government can have the physical device (computer, hard drive) but can never force me to teach them the language to translate the bits into another language that they understand.
Slashdot Mirror
I had many discussions years ago with a colleague about cryptography and coding theory. His analogy about cryptography and the right of law enforcement to obtain the passphrase was in the end asking them to interpret your language for them, which you are not required to do.
Whistling Analogy
Imagine you and I want to speak with each other in a way others do not understand. We create a whistling language where whistles of certain lengths and combinations will represent the codeset of our language. We both agree to this and can communicate effectively, albeit not very much information, when we are both within earshot of each other. Seeing as how we were both Electrical Engineers, we built a modem (I said this was many years ago) that transmits this whistling language over a phone line but at a much higher speed.
Now the government certainly can get a wiretap (and as we've learned AT&T has been providing this all along) and record all the whistles, but they can never force us to teach them what the code means.
To make this analogy more relevant to this case - the whistles are bits (0 and 1) and the hard drive is just the storage mechanism that I am using for communicating with myself at a later time. The encryption is still the language that needs to be interpreted. The government can have the physical device (computer, hard drive) but can never force me to teach them the language to translate the bits into another language that they understand.