This is an interesting story with wide-ranging implications.
Police suspected a woman of fraud and, with a warrant, siezed her computers. One of these computers was password protected and running PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) security software so the police IT experts were not able to ese the usual back doors to crack it. The police believed that this computer contained data that would incriminate their suspect, Ramona Fricosu.
What to do?
The Colorado police went to a judge and got an order compelling Ms. Fricosu to reveal the password to the police.
This is highly problematic, on several fronts. The PopSci article quotes the DOJ’s :
“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 other side – both the defense and the civil liberties groups whose attention was turned to this case – has, in my never-humble-opinion, a much more solid position:
“The Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination is not necessarily a right to prevent you from giving bad things over to the government, but you are protected from disclosing your thoughts,” said Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed an amicus brief in this case. “We argued that providing access to the contents is the equivalent to her ‘emptying the thoughts of her mind,’ because it would require her password.”
What a can of worms this one is…
Thoughts?
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 
January 31, 2012 at 13:35
[…] U.S. JUDGE orders a person to divulge her password … […]
February 1, 2012 at 04:22
They shouldn’t be allowed to force her to give up the password however they should be able to get a warrant to search the computer and be able to take it into custody and attempt to crack the code. As far as I understand if you have a warrant to search a safe you are allowed to break the safe open and you don’t force the person to give you the combination you just break it open. It’s not like the government doesn’t employ people who’s job it is to hack computers so why can’t they do it that way? The police still get the information they want and the person isn’t forced to reveal anything. You have to get a warrant to search a home and you can break down the door to do it legally why not the same thing with a computer? Now if there is nothing there and they break the computer they should be forced to pay for the damages just as they would if they broke open your safe only to find nothing. Now we can argue that the laws surrounding warrants need to be tightened or loosened but that is another issue. the point is the concept of the legal warrant is a good thing and that is how we should go about this.
Xanthippa says:
Quite right!
My understanding is that two computers were siezed with a proper warrant. One was not protected and they had no problem cracking it. The laptop, however, was not running Windows (so no ‘government back doors’) and had PGP – Pretty Good Privacy – encryption running on it and the government experts were simply not able to crack it.
That is why they are attempting to compell the owner to divulge the password.
Your analogies are right on!