Put in those terms, it seems that the trade-off between our right to privacy versus the needs of law enforcement is so ridiculously unbalanced that the law enforcement people ought to just slink away with their tails between their legs.
I shouldn't have to provide specific examples, because you seem to basically be arguing that if I have nothing to hide, I have nothing to fear, but here are a couple anyway:
My doctor has a laptop; I sure hope that any medical records pertaining to me that are on that hard drive are encrypted. Ditto for my lawyer, accountant, etc. I carry around business data and keys to various production servers as well that my boss wouldn't want exposed, too.
But a line for people suffering from pragmatism would be this: In many, many cases someone has a secret. Sometimes even the secret that he has a secret within a domain is secret. For example, a CIA agent if arrested for child porn. Does he give up his password to the disk drive violating his top clearance status or does he shut the hell up. Or what about someone involved with a psychiatry practice that is arrested for child porn. She is legally obligated to keep those records secret. Or what about someone that signed an NDA with a tech or defense company?
The list goes on. Information is the most valuable resource on the planet. It's probably the most valuable resource in the universe. The most valuable information is the information that only you know. They do not have a right to destroy your wealth or to even know that you have any. I'd rather live in a society with a couple extra perverts.
Laws that criminalise consumption of child pornography on the theory that it aids and abets its production by routing material financial support to the source date back to a time when almost all child pornography was obtained in consideration of payment, usually by mail order. That time is long past. Free porn abounds on the Internet, and anyone stupid enough to pay for illegal porn probably deserves to get arrested. There is several orders of magnitude--literally--more child porn today than could have possibly been imagined in the wildest dreams of postal inspectors in the 1980s.
As for the idea that there is a case for criminalisation of child pornography possession or transmission based on some statistical link between child pornography and actual child molestation, that directly contravenes millenia of legal thought. In other words, it should not matter at all whether there is any scientific basis for the allegation of such a correlation or not; it's beside the point. It doesn't matter if 99% of child molesters have child pornography. That shouldn't affect the underlying principle. And the underlying principle is this:
You can't punish someone for something they could--conceivably, in some hypothetical set of circumstances--do, but have not actually done.
I really find the idea that possessing a file is a crime, let alone a rather non-trivial one, to be literally unintelligible. It is one of the most incomprehensible things about contemporary life to me. I don't understand how it's possible given the intellectual pedigree of Western jurisprudence.
Not to mention, many pictures our parents took of us as infants might count, as that is bad enough.
"Child Porn" has been stretched to include things that do not involve any actual children in any way, shape or form.
As for your last statement, contradictions cannot exist. I think that the presumed rationality of the "justice system" is in error.
I just don't get it. I'd like to think I have a pretty broad mind. I'm not a radical or overly idealistic Libertarian. I am capable of comprehending abstractions, extrapolations, generalisations, and juridical pragmatism in the public interest. Still, the rationality of this eludes me completely.
The best I can come up with is that legislators fear it will lead to copycats. Its been shown that people who hear about a suicide are more likely to both commit suicide and do it in the same manner. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide. "Examples of celebrities whose suicides have inspired suicide clusters include the Japanese musicians Yukiko Okada and Hide and Marilyn Monroe, whose death was followed by an increase of 200 more suicides than average for that August month". And if you consider that copycat suicides may not have happened without the trigger suicide, the thought that copycat child abuse may not happen without a trigger child abuse is not a wild leap. And the trigger child abuse can be that harmless few bits.
I'd feel fine about losing some freedom to stop that child abuse trigger. There are all sorts of reasons why some information is protected from the public, and when that information can cause public harm but not be in any public interest the case to ban it is very strong. Child porn may be equivalent to that sort of may be "harmful and not in public interest" category which gets it perma-banned.
tl;dr maybe to stop copycats
In other words, I don't think this is a market problem so I don't see market solutions having any justification (or indeed effect).
In my mind (IANAL), if I don't have to give up information about myself, then I have the right to encrypt my information, and to not be presumed a criminal merely for having encrypted my information.
Note that the 5th amendment is not about protecting your criminal activity, since you're presumed innocent unless convicted. It's a right that you have regardless of your character or activity.
That is a big difference.
It is my opinion, having read accounts of people being prosecuted by the government for various crimes over the past 20 years, that in many cases, the government does not hold itself within the bounds of the law, and that such prosecutions are often illegal themselves. Yet, they are able to get away with this, because, what prosecutor is going to destroy their career by pressing charges on cops, other prosecutors or judges?
Also, in this day and age, asset forfeiture is extremely easy. The government can seize all of your assets, effectively denying you the ability to pay your legal counsel, forcing you to rely on the legal services they provide for you. Further, even if you can afford your own counsel, as an "officer of the court" they are subject to extreme pressure. I've read about a fair number of situations where lawyers would not even introduce constitutional arguments for their defendants innocence because it would result in recriminations against the lawyers by the judge. (e.g.: its "frivolous" to claim that federal drug laws are unconstitutional, even though to criminalize alcohol an amendment was needed.)
I'm not a lawyer, of course, this is just my perspective.
Solitary itself could reasonably be described as abuse.
It all depends on exactly how paranoid you are as to how deep you go with layers of misdirection here of course but the point remains, they cannot continuously compel you to provide a passphrase when they do not know that another one actually exists.
This is the one arena where the only reason the government has any power at all is due to our ignorance, they do not, and indeed should not, have any power at all in this realm.
unfortunately there have been cases of judges simply jailing people for contempt for years
The point is, they can. If you're in some place run by a dictator they can do whatever the hell they want to you, including torturing you until you die.
They won't get more data, but they will send a clear signal to other users of this stuff to behave themselves.
It is generally seen as analogous to the combination to a safe or a key to a door. Compelling revelation of the password is not generally seen as a violation of the Fifth ammendment.
While a ruling from a lower court, there is a good discussion of this at IN RE JURY SUBPOENA TO SEBASTIEN BOUCHER, Dist. Court, D. Vermont 2009 (which is available on Google Scholar)
I now see half way through posting that many other reasons have already been listed, so I'll end it at that. See the plight of Jacob Applebaum who works on the Torproject for a very specific example. I think it got to the stage where he had to replace his electronics when he travels because he couldn't trust what was returned, thats if he gets the equipment back at all from customs, or purchases fresh equipment in foreign countries to know they are 'clean'. I think he weighs is equipment too.