Okay, if you’ll remember, last week there was the whole legal showdown about whether or not someone could be force to decrypt their laptop’s hard drive if the stuff on said hard drive was incrimination. Could decrypting be shielded by the 5th Amendment?
Different appeals courts, it seems, had differing views of that pesky little question.
On Friday of last week, 11th Circuit ruled that the forced decrypting was, indeed, unconstitutional.
However, a mere day before, the 10th circuit refused to hear the appeal, meaning that the order to decrypt remained in place.
Sooooo….What to do?
Constitutional showdown! Pistols at dawn? (Awfully analog.)
As it turned out, the showdown became moot when the feds managed to decrypt the thing without the defendant’s help.
Wired’ Magazine’s Threat Level section, which has been following this issue wonderfully well, has more. Here’s a clip:
Colorado federal authorities have decrypted a laptop seized from a bank-fraud defendant, mooting a judge’s order that the defendant unlock the hard drive so the government could use its contents as evidence against her.
The development ends a contentious legal showdown over whether forcing a defendant to decrypt a laptop is a breach of the Fifth Amendment right against compelled self incrimination.
The authorities seized the encrypted Toshiba laptop from defendant Ramona Fricosu in 2010 with valid court warrants while investigating alleged mortgage fraud, and demanded she decrypt it. Colorado U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn ordered the woman in January to decrypt the laptop by the end of February. The judge refused to stay his decision to allow Fricosu time to appeal.
“They must have used or found successful one of the passwords the co-defendant provided them,” Fricosu’s attorney, Philip Dubois, said in a telephone interview Wednesday.
He said the authorities delivered to him Wednesday a copy of the information they discovered on the drive. Dubois said he has not examined it.
The development comes a week after a federal appeals court ruled in a separate case that forcing a criminal suspect to decrypt hard drives so their contents can be used by prosecutors is a breach of the Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination.
It was the nation’s first appellate court to issue such a finding. The Supreme Court has never dealt directly with the issue.
AND IN OTHER NEWS: WHICH WAY LA? DISCUSSES THE POLICE COMMISSION’S RECENT APPROVAL OF CHIEF BECK’S NEW RULES FOR IMPOUNDING CARS OF UNDOCUMENTED RESIDENTS
Click here and listen.