Here is a case to show the possible complications of technology.
In the case a woman and her husband were arrested and charged with bank fraud. When they were arrested the police served a warrant and seized several laptops. One of them had encrypted files on it. Based on both the names of the files on the laptop and comments by the defendant Ramona Fricosu, they determined it was her laptop and she knew the password.
The authorites served another warrant requesting that she provide a decrypted version of the files, she refused.
The issue being, does providing the decrypted files (and through them the password) violate the 5th amendment rule against self incrimination ?
One judge as ruled that it does not
This is a tough one for me. On the one hand the civil libertarian in me does not want the government to be able to force someone to provide evidence against themselves. On the other hand if the warrant were served and there were locked file cabinets, would it be wrong for the police to require you to unlock the cabinet ?
More importantly, if we adopt an absolute rule that under no circumstances can they require decryption, then how would this impact future law enforcement ? Any drug dealer, white collar criminal, child porn producer, etc could insure they would never be convicted by using a basic encryption system.
Isn’t technology fun ?