3 ms·

So if he ends up forgetting his password while in prison, he's facing a life sentence?

• tjohns 10y ago
  Not likely, but he'd be there for a very long time. Generally speaking, when being held in jail for contempt charges, you can be held indefinitely, so long as you remain in disobedience to a court order. That last part is important, since the idea is you "hold the keys" to your own release. However, if it's physically impossible for you to comply with said court order, you no longer hold those "keys", and can no longer be held in contempt. That said... they're not going to believe you just "forgot" your password. The courts don't look favorably at folks who try to game the system like that, and you'd have a hard time proving otherwise. See Chadwick v. Janecka, where a man was held in contempt for 14 years (!) for refusing to disclose where he allegedly hid funds from an overseas bank account during a divorce proceeding. They eventually let him go after they decided that being held in jail had lost its coercive effect... but again, that took 14 years.
  • cmdrfred 10y ago
    So the burden of proof is on the defendant here? Shouldn't the state have to prove that he does indeed know the passcode and refuses to reveal it, rather than have the defendant prove that he forgot it?
  • mordocai 10y ago
    The problem is that it is actually possible that someone no longer knows the password to some piece of encrypted data. If the government can just hold you indefinitely because they don't believe you then that is a huge issue.
    • dllthomas 10y ago
      If they can show that you've been using the password regularly, recently, for a while, then not believing a claim to have forgotten seems, if not necessarily correct, at least not absurd. If they can't show that, and the file might not have been accessed since it was created years ago, then I think it's unquestionably wrong to ignore the fallibility of human memory.
      • mordocai 10y ago
        Good luck showing that in many cases. Especially if it is an encrypted external drive. I think in most cases they aren't going to be able to show "beyond reasonable doubt" that a person definitely still knows the password.
        • dllthomas 10y ago
          I don't disagree, but I don't think that is a sufficient reason to bear the kind of risk of indefinitely jailing innocents entailed by not requiring such a showing.
          • mordocai 10y ago
            Necroing this, but the proper thing to do is just don't indefinitely jail people without proof of something rather than "requiring" such a showing(you can't really require it since, barring torture/some kind of mind probe, the person can always sit in jail indefinitely and refuse).
    • djloche 10y ago
      Yeah - I lost the password to my DogeCoin wallet within two weeks. I tried all the regular combinations of things. I tried all the unusual combinations of things. I tried old passwords. Gone. Until they have a way to read archived memories...
  • LanceH 10y ago
    They need one of the lawyers that every politician has when they "have no recollection of..."
• astrobe_ 10y ago
  What if the suspect has some sort of accident that involves partial loss of memory? How do they decide if he refuses to cooperate or if can't cooperate? Oh! I know. Waterboarding him for, say, one month should be enough to make sure he actually can't remember.
• deleted 10y ago
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