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.
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.