Re: [privacy] Judge: Man Can't Be Forced to Divulge PGP Passphrase

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

On Sat, 15 Dec 2007 02:10:58 GMT, Paul Ferguson said:
> U.S. Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier ruled that a man charged with
> transporting child pornography on his laptop across the Canadian border has
> a Fifth Amendment right not to turn over the passphrase. The Fifth
> Amendment protects the right to avoid self-incrimination.

I read the article (and several others about this case), and I get the distinct
impression that there's quite a bit of backstory to this whole thing that
hasn't been mentioned in the press:

  A second reason this case is unusual is that Boucher was initially arrested
  when customs agents stopped him and searched his laptop when he and his father
  crossed the border from Canada on December 17, 2006. An officer opened the
  laptop, accessed the files without a password or passphrase, and allegedly
  discovered "thousands of images of adult pornography and animation depicting
  adult and child pornography."

I've always wondered if these guys are *already* on some porn watch list, and
the govt is just waiting for a border crossing where the 4th Amendment isn't
quite as strict.

And how long did they have to poke around the innards of the file system to
find stuff on the Z drive?  I mean, once it's not in someplace obvious
like 'My Documents' or 'My Pr0n Stash' on the desktop, you're probably going
to be in for a lot longer hunting than the agents can afford to do on a
random basis at the customs stop, especially if you're trying to do so in
a way that doesn't screw up all the forensics...

(I once got the "turn the laptop on to prove it's not a bomb" routine, so I
turned it on - it got a bog-standard Dell BIOS screen, then a GRUB screen
that had a Tux on it.  The security guy says "Whoa, weird shit there, but
it turned on so it looks OK to me". Good thing too, I bet a GDM login screen
would have *really* weirded him out. ;)

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