The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled yesterday [.pdf] that a citizen's refusal to decrypt encrypted drives is protected by the Fifth Amendment, at least under some circumstances. In doing so it reversed the district court's contempt order entered against a John Doe defendant after he refused to decrypt his laptop hard drive and five external hard drives in response to a subpoena. This decision arguably conflicts with an earlier decision in which a district court in Vermont required a defendant to provide the password to his encrypted drives. The Eleventh Circuit distinguishes the earlier case on the basis that the government in that case knew of the existence of the files and simply couldn't access them, while in the recent case the government did not know the names of files or even whether or not files actually existed on the encrypted drives.
posted by monju_bosatsu on Feb 24, 2012 - 89 comments

Public interests will be harmed absent requiring defendants to make available unencrypted contents in circumstances like these. Failing to compel Ms. Fricosu amounts to a concession to her and potential criminals (be it in child exploitation, national security, terrorism, financial crimes or drug trafficking cases) that encrypting all inculpatory digital evidence will serve to defeat the efforts of law enforcement officers to obtain such evidence through judicially authorized search warrants, and thus make their prosecution impossible.

The "if you were innocent, you'd have nothing to hide" argument rears its head, in a big way. [more inside]
posted by fifthrider on Jul 11, 2011 - 215 comments

Christopher Soghoian, who exposed the latest Facebook PR move, is now filing an FTC complaint (pdf) against Dropbox on the grounds that they gained unfair competitive advantage by lying about how files are encrypted and who has access to them. Dropbox explains how safe your files are.
posted by swift on May 13, 2011 - 44 comments

Our results open a fascinating new direction for position-based security in cryptography where security of protocols is solely based on the laws of physics and proofs of security do not require any pre-existing infrastructure.
posted by Joe Beese on Aug 8, 2010 - 47 comments

Technophobia? or ignorance? or mendacity? A Minnesota appeals court has ruled that the presence of encryption software on a computer may be viewed as evidence of criminal intent. The specific crime here aside, why is encryption - and by extension privacy - viewed as something seedy?
posted by Smedleyman on May 27, 2005 - 10 comments

Terrorism's first win? Bye-Bye crypto. The rubble is still burning and the Republicans are ready to strip of our right to use crypto products. Opportunists feeding off fear. That's how you win at the terrorist game.
posted by skallas on Sep 13, 2001 - 51 comments

ALL YOUR EMAIL ARE BELONG TO US! How serious is this threat? What precautions do you routinely take? What precautions do you think you *should* be taking? What viable options do we have today, for those of us who aren't computer programmers by profession? And how secure are they, anyway?
posted by rushmc on May 30, 2001 - 12 comments