Court Demanded To Decrypt Password

In the 21st century, the talk is again about the Fifth Amendment! Some individual is alleged of a mortgage scam, which is not the rare case, but it can prove a test case to see whether it’s unconstitutional for the American government to punish people for refusing to disclose their encryption codes.

According to media reports, the US government has a federal judge to order the accused individual (a woman), Ramona Fricosu, to decrypt her encrypted laptop after she refused the authorities to do so. But it still has to be decided if such a request breaks the American Constitution's Fifth Amendment, which, as you remember, allows citizens to remain silent if they are charged.

The attorney of the suspected woman, Philip Dubois, argued that defendants cannot be constitutionally obligated to help the authorities interpret their files. In response, the American Justice Department insists that the court order is actually a simple extension of a long-standing ability of prosecutors to gather data that could become evidence at the trial.

In case Ramona Fricosu fails to compel, she amounts to a concession that criminals get an easy way out of prosecution – they can simply encrypt all their files and the police won’t be able to access them and collect evidence. Of course, the authorities don’t want this, so the government insists that the accused woman will be allowed to type her passwords in and unlock the encrypted files, and there will be nobody looking over her shoulder to see the passwords themselves. All the authorities wanted was the decrypted information, and they stressed that they didn’t require the woman to provide the password to the laptop – neither orally nor in written form.

The case attracted the attention of many civil rights groups, many of which are saying that the US citizens cannot be demanded to give any compelled testimonial communications. So, the rights groups wanted the legal shield of the Fifth Amendment to cover encryption passwords as well. The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) also insisted that the Justice Department's request should have been rejected, because the Fifth Amendment reads that no person can be forced to be a witness against himself in any criminal case.