I cannot find a good thread for this so pardon me for creating a new one. I thought this was worthy of some publicity (slanted article, but you get the idea):
I don't see why this is a complicated court case, honestly. It seems like a pretty clear 5th Amendment protection. You're not required to help investigators in a search of any of your other property - why would it be different here?
Yes, how hard can it be to crack this? Heck you could prob just take out the harddrive and hook it up with another computer to read the data.
Its an interesting case for sure but to take a different angle on it. What if they consider this more along the lines of the 4th Amendment and consider the PC to be like a locked house. Maybe one of the lawyers here can help me but if the police have a warrant and want to search my house do I have to unlock the door or can I not cooperate so they have to break the door down?
Depends. RSA 1024 is (at the moment) virtually unbreakable. But that's moot honestly if the results are not admissible in court.
Most likely, its a hard drive password which makes the hard drive unreadable unless you enter the password. You could pay someone to take out the spindles and raw read them, but that is really expensive. Edit: After reading it again, she must have her whole hard drive encrypted. Good for her.
I knew I had read about this earlier... US CBP already got the court to agree with a similar situation... http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10172866-38.html
