• 0 Posts
  • 4 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle
  • As far as the US goes, that’s incorrect. The issue is a 1A issue, not a 5A issue.

    tl;dr - you are required to provide keys, combinations, fingerprints, etc. when there’s a warrant. You might not be required to provide passwords.

    Let’s say cops have a search warrant for your house, and you have a safe in your house that they think the evidence of the crime they’re investigating is hidden in. But it’s locked. You are obligated to unlock that safe for them, whether it’s a physical key, a combination, or a fingerprint. If you refuse, you can be compelled, and can be held in contempt of court and held in jail until you comply. (Or course, in the case of a physical safe, refusing the provide the key would mean that they’d hire a security expert to destroy the safe in order to retrieve the contents. But that’s not possible with encrypted data.)

    The problem is that a password is both a key and speech. I can be compelled to provide a key, but I can’t be compelled to engage in certain speech. So far, courts have been divided on what a password is, and I don’t believe that the question has been addressed by SCOTUS yet. (Although, knowing SCOTUS, I wouldn’t expect them to be tech-savvy enough to make a good ruling.) In some cases, people that have been under court orders to provide passwords have been held in jail on contempt charges until they’ve divulged the password, even when they say that they’ve forgotten the password in question.

    Keep in mind that the people that this is often applied to are not usually people you’d want to be friends with; most of that cases I’ve seen in the news involve people that are accused of having child pornography, either uploading or downloading it, or terrorism. But obvs. revoking rights to deal with exceptionally scummy people also means that those rights get revoked for everyone else…