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Encryption passphrase protected under 5th amendment
Submitted by altj on Mon, 05/19/2008 - 13:19
This is kinda old news, but interesting anyway. According to this story, "A federal judge in Vermont has ruled that prosecutors can't force a criminal defendant accused of having illegal images on his hard drive to divulge his PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) passphrase."
For those of you that don't remember, this part of the 5th amendment says, "No person...shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself..."
I guess I can change my encryption passphrase to something other than "I don't know." now.
That is really interesting.
That is really interesting. So if they can take your hard drive as evidence does that mean they have to crack your password?
That's exactly what it
That's exactly what it means, unless they're able to get your passphrase by other means. I remember hearing about some pre-work that was done before arresting some people involved in organized crime. The pre-work involved installing keystroke loggers on the accused's systems. Once they had gathered what they needed through the keystroke loggers, they could go in, arrest, and seize the equipment. From the information gathered, it would be much easier to go through and figure out what their passphrases were.
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