The rule make very little sense. I would not bet in favor of it continuing for long. The whole idea that the prosecutor is only asking for the container and not the content was extremity transparent to begin with, and judges who have rejected that argument have said just that. In that case the conclusion the judges made is that a request for the container (ie the unencrypted device) is the same as a request for the information itself, and thus should be seen as such.
It all comes down to the duck test. Is the request for the decrypted container similar as asking directly for the content to be written down by the accused, or spoken about in the form of a testimony? Does it has the same purpose and the same result?
In the hard drive case and the hypothetical body location case the government is trying to compel speech that directly leads to incriminating evidence. That seems like a solidly 5th amendment issue to me.
I don't think these two situations are the same. When you run a business there are legal requirements to retain data, and provide that data when audited. The police telling you to tell them were you placed a notebook doesn't seem like an equivalent situation. And how can the police prove you wrong if you say you forgot where you placed it? In fact this is what the defendant alleges:
> A judge ordered Rawls to decrypt the hard drives. In its recent ruling, the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals described what happened next. Rawls "stated that he could not remember the passwords necessary to decrypt the hard drives and entered several incorrect passwords during the forensic examination."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/man-who-refused-...
By producing other evidence that suggests that you’re lying (eg. metadata or witnesses suggesting that you recently entered the correct password). In this case the judge had to reject Rawls’ claim of lost memory in order to find him in contempt. Maybe the judge’s finding of fact was wrong, but that’s not what the case is about now.
People have forgotten passwords in a matter of minutes in some cases. Not to mention, this guy has been held in prison for 4 years. Plenty of time to forget a password. Forget the password to an encrypted drive is a life sentence?
I'd also note that giving the government your books is required by financial laws as a condition do being allowed to do business, it's not testimony or your general obligation of cooperating with an investigation.
Another way to look at it is that the only real evidence in court is witness testimony; everything else is just window dressing. Thus we have the Fifth Amendment: "[no person] shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself."
How does that get turned into a rule that a defendant can't be forced to divulge information outside court? Because to be admissible in court such information would normally require the defendant to be a witness. If it's not admissible then there's no legitimate basis for the state to compel an act. That leads to two corollaries: 1) if the person isn't a defendant, or is given immunity, he would never be required to be a witness against himself (just a witness against someone else), and thus the Fifth Amendment isn't implicated; 2) if the evidence obtained from the information would be admissible without the defendant's testimony, the Fifth Amendment likewise isn't implicated.
#2 is the case here. Because the government can already show ownership of the hard drives through other witness testimony (e.g. testimony of a relative, purchase receipts, etc), it would be categorically unnecessary for the defendant to testify in court to the incriminating act of divulging the password. However, if for some reason it later turned out that the government couldn't show ownership independently, then of course the hard drives would be inadmissible; not because of the forced password disclosure, per se, but simply because the defendant himself couldn't be compelled to be a witness to his act of divulging the password--an investigator couldn't testify that the defendant disclosed the password as that would be hearsay.[1] But such a turnaround is rare as a court won't compel disclosure unless it's clear there's ample independent and admissible evidence of ownership.
[1] There are lots of exclusions and exceptions to hearsay, especially regarding defendant admissions, but they're disallowed if they would effectively nullify the spirit of the Fifth Amendment if permitted for compelled acts. If you're a strict textualist, as most conservative-leaning people believe themselves to be, then one would presumably be okay with permitting those exceptions, particularly those exceptions which existed at the time of ratification of the Fifth Amendment.
I don’t particularly like that train of thought, but given (for example) the higher court’s willingness for the sentence “I want a lawyer, dawg” to be a request for canine companionship and not one asserting a 6th amendment right to counsel, I don’t think I’m wrong.
I think some courts have been squeamish about forced disclosure, sometimes because they hold a more liberal interpretation of the Fifth Amendment that relies on broader principles, sometimes because the situation is often far more complex and uncertain (if not completely incomparable to the hypothetical context I relied on) and they rightly err on the side of protecting the defendant's rights.
In this [EDIT: hypothetical] case I believe this analysis is the correct one, not just because of the text but also the purpose and history of the Fifth Amendment. It's not the proper vehicle to push other principles and legal theories that would restrict such forced disclosure. I lean rather liberal when it comes to constitutional interpretation, but at the same time rights built on sand aren't rights you can rely on. The law in this area seems muddy and precarious precisely because the liberal narrative is too incoherent. (Note: The liberal narrative in this case--that forced disclosure of a password is categorically barred, notwithstanding the intricacies of the rules of evidence--isn't politically partisan. Thus my subtle dig at contemporary conservative constitutional interpretation, which is often incoherent itself.)
EDIT: To be clear, in the case discussed in the article almost everything is more complicated than the simple hypothetical. I was responding at a point in this thread where the discussion already had become abstract.
An unecessary personal detail: I wouldn’t describe myself as leaning liberal on constitutional interpretation (although all my Writs would lead one to assume I am firmly in favor of it), I certainly see myself as a die hard centrist in this area.
I have never seen any authority for the view that the Fifth Amendment was intended literally to prevent the accused from being called as a prosecution witness at trial, as opposed to creating a general privilege against self-incrimination. For example, in Brown v. Walker (1896) [1], an early Fifth Amendment case, the Supreme Court said:
> the States, with one accord, made a denial of the right to question an accused person a part of their fundamental law, so that a maxim which, in England, was a mere rule of evidence became clothed in this country with the impregnability of a constitutional enactment.
I'm pretty sure it's relatively simple for police to break into offices and take financial records. I would imagine it happens relatively often, because simply asking a suspect to give up their books seems more likely to result in them attempting to hide or destroy their books.
The reason police and prosecutors don't like encryption is because they can't use violence to acquire what they want, at least directly. They need new (or at least specifically-clarified) laws about what they can do to you to make you decrypt your data.
This is precisely why "Obstruction of Justice" is a criminal offense with severe penalties available. The question then becomes: is deliberately encrypting and refusing to provide access to those books obstruction?
I know the folks here would argue otherwise, but IMHO it's not at all a clear argument legally. The original reasoning behind the fifth amendment was that without that protection the government would be tempted to use coercive tactics to induce a false confession. It's designed to prevent the torture of accused witches, not to be a literal get-out-of-jail-free card for crypto nuts.
Since email deletion policies aren't obstruction until you're told to suspend them, there's no way an encryption policy is obstruction.
> to be a literal get-out-of-jail-free card for crypto nuts
Pff. It's not like simply not writing things down is a get out of jail free card.
So technicalities like you're invoking (is refusing to do something "obstruction" or not?) need to be balanced against technicalities on the other side (is providing a decryption key "testimony"?). And when courts have had to make decisions like this they've almost always done it by splitting the difference in some way instead of finding an absolute interpretation on one side or the other.
I'm not saying I disagree with you in principle, I'm saying that very reasonable courts might not. This isn't a cut and dry argument, at all.
No, this requires a warrant in the US for it to be lawfully used as evidence.
It's worth noting that the defendant in question was told to unencrypt the devices by the courts, which is pretty much in effect the same thing as a warrant, so it's not as if the government was torturing him to decrypt the data; the court had already decided it was material evidence in a case.
But if you wrote in a made-up language that only you know, can they force you to translate it?
I in no way want the following to appear that I have an opinion as to anything regarding Trump’s anything, but
2) Trump was acquitted because of the way the US impeachment process is set up, if I am sure of anything, it is the fact that no votes to acquit where based in any way on Seklow’s arguments about presumption based on the 5th amendment.
0 —> https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi...
Watch that video. Then watch it again. Schedule a yearly watching or three.
Because innocent people do get wrongly convicted. If you don't want to be that innocent person, you might have to assert your rights, including your Fifth Amendment rights.
Note that the Fifth Amendment does not say that you can't be forced to incriminate yourself, as many TV courtroom dramas wrongly imply. Statements like "the mob takes the Fifth" are based on that kind of incorrect reading of the Amendment.
The Fifth Amendment actually says that you can't be forced to be a witness against yourself. A witness can provide testimony that looks incriminating even if the defendant is actually innocent, and such testimony can lead to an innocent person being wrongly convicted. The Fifth Amendment is there to help reduce the chances of that happening.
My post was above was a bit naughty, as I was quoting the current president (in response to a post discussing his recent impeachment) without revealing that it was a quotation.
They can require you to tell them where the body is if you “encrypted” its location (i.e. buried it somewhere)
Telling someone the encryption key is being compelled to act as a witness against yourself, which the 5th amendment provides protection against (if used).
There's no prospect of this being used to bring about a wrongful conviction through coercing a confession.
It is exactly the same as when a confidential source gives up an address (for example) the source never gets into evidence.
If the key involves a password that you, a human, have memorized in your squishy pink organ, it's privileged under the Fifth Amendment. (This hasn't been tested in court yet, of course. There's no precedent to fall back on.)
This would seem to imply that if the government has ample evidence that you murdered someone, they can require you to admit to it in court.