Re:Colorado woman must unencrypt hard drive
by Arelius on Wednesday February 22, 2012 @07:47PM
(#3623282)
As a response to #1, I'm pretty sure that wouldn't hold up. Unless they specifically state that she will "Run the XXX Algorithm on the drive" It's probably legally sound that she has to fully decrypt all the data.
#2 probably holds similarly. The remaining ones are just getting more ridiculous.
1. What if I encrypt the drive twice? Sure, I'll decrypt the first layer, then they can have the "contents" of that.
2. What are the legal implications if I've "encrypted" something written down? i.e. replaced every letter with the next letter in the alphabet. Do I have to decrypt that?
3. What are the legal implications if I've written things down in another language, known only to me - can I be forced to translate it? I would think a nice defense here is to say they can have the disk, it's just in another language, which is their problem.
4. Further to point 3. what if I have the info on a drive with a File System that only I can read/write? Do I have to give them the tools to read the file system?
5. Similar to point 4, I write my own custom binary file format that only I know how to read/write - again, do I have to describe the file format?
This is about to get crazy.