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Comment by corysama | Hacker News Reader

Apparently, not. This guy accidentally tested it the hard way:

http://www.reddit.com/comments/afib1/truecrypt_and_the_fifth...

This entire story smells fake. If TrueCrypt just saved your life, would you really go tell reddit? The dialogue feels constructed; there's no insight about the experience. It's more likely that it's a fabrication by a district attorney, to be cited in the future (just as you have here).

Edit: further evidence for this being a fake:

* This supposedly happened in Februrary 2004, back when TrueCrypt was version 1.0a and barely known.

* His story suggests that his laptop's system drive was encrypted. TrueCrypt added system disk encryption in version 5.0 in 2008.

* He slips up and says he used AES encryption; this is noticed in the comments and he edits it out (I assume).

It does; OTOH people post some outrageous shit w/r/t their adventures with the law on Reddit. Yesterday, for example, some guy posted pics of an FBI tracking device he found on the underside of his car (http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/dmh5s/does_this_...). A couple months ago some guy wrote an AMA a days before he was to start a multi-year bid in Federal. (http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/chc3k/iama_fella_getti...)

Personally I am inclined to believe.

You may be right. There's a good chance that the AMA is fake.

Meanwhile, here's a much more reputable source (pointed out elsewhere in these comments) that indicates that this issue is not yet resolved and is currently being tested.

http://cyb3rcrim3.blogspot.com/2009/03/5th-amendment-bummer....

http://cyb3rcrim3.blogspot.com/2010/04/passwords-and-5th-ame...

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