I wouldn't say this issue is fully "worked out" yet. Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. Most of what I know about this is from the last twenty minutes of googling

I wouldn't say this issue is fully "worked out" yet. Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. Most of what I know about this is from the last twenty minutes of googling. In 2007 a federal judge ruled that passwords aren't like keys to a safe, and that the government can't force somebody to hand them over. (United States v. Boucher http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9834495-38.html http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9834495-38.html ) However, that decision was partially overruled in 2009. ( http://www.bennettandbennett.com/node/5608 http://www.bennettandbennett.com/node/5608 ) The judge ruled that the defendant didn't have to provide his password, but he did have to provide the contents on the hard drive. In other words, if the defendant happend to have an unencrypted copy of the hard drive hidden away somewhere he could have offered that in place of the password. Using your safe analogy, it would be like saying that you don't have to provide the government with the key to the safe, but you do have to provide them with an identical copy of everything contained within the safe. Now, like me you're probably wondering how the government could prove that the contents you provide from a secondary source really matches up with what's on the encrypted drive. The Boucher case mentioned above was unique because border control agents had already viewed the contents of the guy's laptop in unencrypted form, so they knew what to expect. (In his case, child porn.) From what I can find, there don't appear to be any laws in the U.S. (and no case law) which specifically require people to hand over their passwords at the government's request. Here are two more links I found which were helpful: http://volokh.com/files/BoucherDCT.1.pdf http://volokh.com/files/BoucherDCT.1.pdf and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Boucher http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Boucher