Man jailed indefinitely for refusing to decrypt hard drives loses appeal (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Man jailed indefinitely for refusing to decrypt hard drives loses appeal (2011)

arstechnica.com

23 pointsBluestein9 comments

He was freed in 2020: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/man-who-refused-...

There’s a comment on that later article that surely he would be charged for real on the existing evidence. But at least google turned up nothing.

“Of course, the contents of the hard drive might incriminate Rawls, but the contents of the hard drive are not considered testimony for Fifth Amendment purposes.”

Huh

If no testimony/unencrypted evidence was needed why not just proceed to trail? Why contempt of court?

This is clearly a 5th amendment violation.

Kinda interesting how such an important bit of case law centers around such a vile crime. Nevertheless.

Maybe it's cheaper just to keep him in jail on contempt of court than actually proceed to trail.

The trail to trials is paved with good intentions.

(I'm sorry, but both of you using "trail" instead of "trial" made my eye twitch.)

Does anyone remember the first person in the UK to be jailed for not releasing his decryption key ? He was a schizophrenic person had was randomly stopped coming back from France. He was jailed for a year. There was no hint of any crime. He was sticking up for his principles and highly obsessive.

The dangers to these laws are great, someone may have genuinely forgotten the password. It’s not considered an offence.

Or worse yet. Authorities could claim random bytes are encrypted.

In reality. With sort of arrest there’s no way to tell that the authorities didn’t plant evidence or even no evidence even exists.

Welcome to the 21st century. Where even the Netherlands fabricates evidence and gets away with it.

https://npo.nl/start/serie/de-villamoord/seizoen-2/de-leeuw-...

The defense of people involved in the iran-contra scandal was entirely based around the phrase "I have no clear recollection of those events". Funny how they didn't have to spend years in jail until they remembered.

Article is dated 2017, not 2011. (Also he was arrested in 2015, so 2011 is clearly wrong.)

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