The UK _does_ have a constitution -- but according to a barrister of my acquaintance it consists of thirty-one separate acts of parliament. (Think of it as a di

The UK _does_ have a constitution -- but according to a barrister of my acquaintance it consists of thirty-one separate acts of parliament. (Think of it as a distributed legal kernel rather than a monolithic one. Oh, and the acts can be revised/amended by parliament without needing a constitutional convention or equivalent.) There's no actual fifth amendment equivalent, but there _is_ a bill of rights (at least, since 1998). RiderOfGiraffes is exactly right about silence being a factor that can be drawn to the attention of a jury ... On the subject of the bits of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2002) that make failure to hand over encryption keys an imprisonable offense, it's worth noting that an order to hand them over has first to be made in the process of a criminal investigation. If someone has encrypted data and refuses to hand over the keys despite facing a maximum 5-year prison term, then it's reasonable to presume that they consider the data to be so incriminating that they'd pull a _longer_ sentence if they decrypted it. I believe (but am not certain -- the powers have been used to rarely that there's little to go on) that a plausible explanation of why the keys are unavailable ("I generated a PGP keychain in 1996 out of curiousity, but I lost interest and stopped using it, and that was twelve PCs ago") would probably work in court (in the absence of evidence contradicting it).