Yes, absolutely. Goode said "renders the material extremely difficult to access." That's government-speak for "resort to brute force." The ability to break

Yes, absolutely. Goode said "renders the material extremely difficult to access." That's government-speak for "resort to brute force." The ability to break RSA would do the government more damage than it would do Miranda. If they have broken RSA they aren't admitting it. Perhaps Miranda needed to transfer some of his sensitive data to a machine he couldn't supply the password to. (Maybe he thought the machine might be unsafe or keylogged etc.) Or maybe the 20 GB partition was his "plausible deniability" partition and he surrendered that key to avoid getting arrested. After moving the files to his unencrypted partition, he could access them on any machine by simply plugging in the hard drive. He should have securely erased the data after he was done, yes, but that can be difficult when traveling. This can be seen as an interesting commentary on the legitimate usability problems with using crypto, even though the crypto itself is doing its job just fine.