Decrypting Hard Drives not Self Incriminating, Says Judge

Decrypting a seized hard drive for police doesn’t count as incriminating yourself, says Colorado U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn. The defendant in the case, accused of bank fraud, claimed that decrypting her hard drive for the police constituted a violation of the Fifth Ammendment.

But in Blackburn’s ruling, he states “I conclude that the Fifth Amendment is not implicated by requiring production of the unencrypted contents of the Toshiba Satellite M305 laptop computer.”

As you can imagine, civil rights groups have been paying attention to this case. Until now, there has never been a ruling on whether it violated the Fifth Amendment to require a defendant to decrypt a hard drive. The ruling essentially allows encrypted files to be treated much like private property, which can be searched with the proper warrants.

The main issue is that such encrypted drives require the drive’s encrypter to decrypt, something a physical search doesn’t require. And while it is theoretically possible to crack encryption without the help of the owner, doing so would “require significant resources and may harm the subject computer.”

It really was just a matter of time before this issue came to a head. Every major new operating system, from Windows, to Mac OSX, to Linux, offers full-drive encryption. With the press of a few buttons, all your data is protected from everyone, including the government. It was fear of this that prompted the US government to [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/09/government-seeks|seek] back-doors to encrypted systems. So, in some ways, this ruling may help ensure the security of cryptography. After all, if you are legally required to provide the key when a warrant is given, then you don’t need to risk compromising every secure system in a way that not only criminals might abuse, but law enforcement might too.

Apparently, the judge claimed to hear compelling evidence that there might be pertinent evidence relating to the case on the hard drive. The implication of his statement is that he wouldn’t have issued the same ruling if there was no evidence there was something substantial on the drive.

Wired Photo by : Tim Patterson