The Third Circuit last week held oral arguments on whether an individual can be forced to decrypt a drive with incriminating information on it. The Fifth Amendment prohibits any person from bring “compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” The Third Circuit will hopefully recognize that being forced to decrypt information is just the kind of testimonial act that the Fifth Amendment prohibits.
In a forced decryption case there are two kinds of subpoenas that could be issued. The first compels the individual to turn over the encryption key or password. This isn’t the kind of subpoena in the Third Circuit case, but it is useful in looking at why this is also not allowed. The other kind of subpoena is to produce the documents themselves.
With a direct subpoena of the password the password itself isn’t incriminating, but the Supreme Court has held that that the Fifth Amendment also prevents compelling incriminating “information directly or indirectly derived from such testimony.” The Supreme Court “particularly emphasized the critical importance of protection against a future prosecution ‘based on knowledge and sources of information obtained from the compelled testimony.’” While the password itself isn’t incriminating it clearly provides the lead necessary to get incriminating information from the encrypted drives. Another close analogy that seems to apply was that the Supreme Court clearly prohibited compelling a person to disclose a combination to a safe.
Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/you-have-right-remain-silent-even-you-use-encryption
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