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A similar example are couriers who travel handcuffed to a briefcase - having keys for neither. However, in both these examples there is a very important differ
by lesserknowndan 13y ago
A similar example are couriers who travel handcuffed to a briefcase - having keys for neither.
However, in both these examples there is a very important difference. A thorough strip search would reveal that the person does not in fact have the required/desired keys.
Also, usually such people have superiors who may be contacted in order to get access (if they want to push it that far). I'm not sure if a person could use such a defence if they are a normal traveller or their company does not carry much weight.
- cheald 13y agoThere's the rub. Law enforcement can't prove that you have the keys (unless you volunteer them), and that's why being forced to unlock something is a violation of the 5th amendment (since the ability to unlock the data is by itself an admission of possession). There was a case - I don't recall the specifics - of a guy that was caught with child porn on his computer crossing the Canadian border. The courts compelled him to unlock his encrypted partitions because he had already unlocked them once (when asked to by the border agent) thereby proving that he had access to the keys. If he had never unlocked it in the first place, the fifth would have protected him against being compelled to decrypt the data, since the act of unlocking it would in effect be a coerced admission that the data was his.