subpoenas of personal papers

[Bob Torres]

>I just saw a news story that bears on one of the perpetual questions on
>this newsgroup:  can you be compelled to turn over your encryption
>key?  In Doe vs. U.S. (93-523), the Supreme Court declined to rule on


Just thought that I'd throw in my somewhat unrelated $.02...

        Here at Penn State University, a hacker/crakcer/whatever was caught
on one of our mainframes back in 89 or 90 and he had some files encrypted
with DES on his minidisk.  The authorities asked him for the passphrase and
told him that if he refused that they'd crack it with a Cray in something
like six hours.  He ultimately gave in but I wonder if it would have been
legal for the authorities to brute force a passphrase on the file...this is
relatively unbroken legal ground.  
        Of course, this is DES which was made weak enough to be breakable. 
PGP is a much different story.  
          
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Bob Torres                      Use an electronic envelope...   
plato at phantom.com              Support the use of cryptography.
PGP public key available..