[Politech] Judge rules defendant can't be forced to divulge PGP passphrase [priv]

[Declan McCullagh]

I haven't been very prolific with Politech recently, in part because I'm 
 trying to send out only more important items rather than routine news 
stories. This one meets the importance test.

Text of article:
http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-9834495-38.html

First three grafs:

  A federal judge in Vermont has ruled that prosecutors can't force a
  criminal defendant accused of having illegal images on his hard drive
  to divulge his PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) passphrase.

  U.S. Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier ruled that a man charged with
  transporting child pornography on his laptop across the Canadian
  border has a Fifth Amendment right not to turn over the
  passphrase to prosecutors. The Fifth Amendment protects the right
  to avoid self-incrimination.

  Niedermeier tossed out a grand jury's subpoena that directed Sebastien
  Boucher to provide "any passwords" used with the Alienware
  laptop. "Compelling Boucher to enter the password forces him to
  produce evidence that could be used to incriminate him," the judge
  wrote in an order dated November 29 that went unnoticed until this
  week. "Producing the password, as if it were a key to a locked
  container, forces Boucher to produce the contents of his laptop."

Link to court opinion:
http://www.volokh.com/files/Boucher.pdf

Orin Kerr's this-ruling-is-wrong post:
http://volokh.com/posts/1197670606.shtml

Link to Michael Froomkin's old law review article touching on this:
http://osaka.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/seminar/papers/anon/intlaw_paper.html

-Declan
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