Comment by scottdw2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scottdw2 | Hacker News Reader

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You can be compelled to produce a physical key to a safe. However what if the contents of the safe are paper with text written in an invented language, known only to you?

Can you be compelled to translate them for the court?

What if they just contained numbers? Could you be forced to explain what the numbers mean?

I would conclude that such an action would violate the 5th ammendment.

Forcing her to decrypt the hard drive is the same thing.

Given a warrant, the police have the right to search her hard drive. If they can't understand what it says, she should not have to explain it to them.

Right now, they have no evidence. She is being compelled to produce evidence against her self.

Providing a physical key produces no evidence. It produces a key.

Providing a decrypted version of the data on the laptop is producing information. The contents of the laptop are such that they exhibit a high level of entropy. By definition, they are not information. If they did contain information, they would by definition not be encrypted.

Thus, the request is for the defendant in a criminal trial to replace something that is not information with something that is information. That is clearly a violation of the 5th ammendment.

Comment taken from Reddit:

Actually if you read the ruling, it states that they have a recording of a conversation, transcribed in the ruling, where she basically admits what they are looking for is on the laptop. They then use existing Vermont case law where some perv had child porn on his laptop that an officer and ICE agent witnessed before getting locked out of the laptop. The case law the judge quotes says "where the existence and location of the documents are known to the government, no constitutional rights are touched, because these matters are a foregone conclusion." So basically the established case law they are using is where they already knew for sure the perv's laptop contained the evidence they are looking for because they saw it firsthand. In this lady's case, they know the laptop contains the documents they are looking for because they have her recorded saying so. The judge states as much in the ruling: "There is little question here but that the government knows of the existence and location of the computer’s files." So as much as people are freaking out about this, I don't think this is definitive case law that says the 5th amendment doesn't ever apply. The Vermont case and now the Colorado case both hinge on the government knowing that what they are looking for is on the encrypted drive because they saw it and have an admission to it respectively. This is what the ruling states in my opinion. The 5th amendment may still apply if they don't know for sure the encrypted drive contains what they are looking for, that is to say they never saw the contents nor you admitted to it containing the contents which they seek.

The laptop does not "contain" what they are looking for. It contains gibberish.

If they had her on tape saying "the evidence is in my house" and then they searched her house and didn't find anything, could they force her to tell them where the evidence was?

No.

Any position based on an analog to a vault, is ignorant of the facts. Encrypted data is not locked in anything. It's scrambled.

Here's another analogue:

A locked safe on your portch carries an expectation of privacy. It can't be opened by the police without a warrant. A dropped disk in plain site on your steps does not. The police could copy the disk, break its encryption and use the data as evidence against you.

Why? Because encrypted data isn't "locked", it's scrambled. If a credible expert can unscramble it, then reading it was not a "search". It's equivalent to reading a paper taken from your garbage.

The tape recording of her changes nothing about the facts of what the contes of the drive are (gibberish), nor what the nature of decryption is (testimony). Any judicial holdings to the contrary are erroneous violations of the constitution and should be vacated.

The contents of the laptop are such that they exhibit a high level of entropy. By definition, they are not information.

uh, the bits of a compressed file also exhibit a high level of entropy. Are compressed files not information either?

A compressed file has a bit pattern that clearly identifies it as compressed. It has statistical structure. Either way, a court couldn't compel her to uncompress a file either, as it would still constitute testimony.

I agree and so do past rulings. This judge needs brush up on US law.

There were all kinds of rulings, and it has never reached the Supreme Court. So until then, a judge can lock you up indefinitely, until you produce the password.

Maybe I'm wrong, but doesn't entropy in an information source mean there's _more_ information rather than less ?

No, assuming you mean high entropy. (You need a qualifier with "entropy", e.g. high or low.) Roughly, high entropy means disorder, information means order:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(statistical_views) Look at the coin toss example.

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