MS> However, if I have a wall safe and MS> they get a warrant to search it, can I be jailed for contempt if I MS> don't give them the combination?

Well, IANAL, but yes, I believe that you can be. Or, worse, obstruction of justice. Especially if they cut it open and find that the knife was in the safe.

So presumably the same would apply to the password that unlocks my PGP private key. But there's an interesting twist. Once they open up the wall safe, they can see for sure what is and isn't in it. This ain't necessarily so for an encrypted file. Suppose my software has the fiendish sophistication to disgorge different keys depending on what password was given, and different pieces of cleartext depending on what key was used. (Again, I apologize if this notion has already been extensively discussed.) Is there a way to set it up such that the cops couldn't be sure -- even using a logic analyzer -- that I hadn't given them the complete set of keys, so as to read all the cleartexts in the file? Assume that cyphertext files are guaranteed to be larger, by some random factor, than the sum of all the cleartexts in them, so the mere fact that a smaller quantity of cleartext was disgorged than cyphertext supplied would tell them nothing. I guess this is a kind of steganography, isn't it? Or at least something similar -- the point would be that they couldn't tell genuine cyphertext from camouflaging noise, without the key that tells them where to look. Which brings us, in turn, to the bottom line: the only things we can be certain the bad guys _won't_ do, are the things they _can't_ do. --Michael Smith smithmi@dev.prodigy.com