
Ask HN: Getting Sued for Leaving Behind an Encrypted Partition - throwaway201979
HN,<p>A former employer has threatened to drag me into court, over an encrypted partition that they don&#x27;t have the password for. That they believe they can compel me to disclose the password is somewhat amusing to me.<p>They have no valuable information to retrieve. It&#x27;s on a daily-use personal desktop machine. One that was left powered off, they are now in the physical presence of. It does not host any mission critical services. I created the partition for my own use.<p>Given the pervasive monitoring tools deployed onto the company network, I found it a huge distraction to have a heavy handed desktop support team breathing down my neck and possibly logging every click and keystroke. Used as a start-up disk, I found it easier to concentrate, and do more work for them, knowing that they wouldn&#x27;t be able to interrupt me by abruptly taking control of my mouse and keyboard when I&#x27;m in the middle of something. The encryption served as assurance that they could not install OS level rootkits.<p>I also used personal laptops in the course of working for them, and it hasn&#x27;t even occurred to them that such a thing is likely much, much worse than a mysterious black box occupying 500 GB on office equipment currently in their possession, and under total control.<p>Needless to say, they are a toxic organization, and there&#x27;s a reason I left abruptly. I even forfeited 14 days paid vacation time, just to never have to talk to them again. No damages have occurred, and I think that much is obvious to all parties. I&#x27;m doing nothing.<p>Why should anyone develop an opinion that it&#x27;s acceptable to jump to legal tactics in a civil context, when they could just wipe the partition and call it a day? Is it the shiny object factor? Is it a malignant, sociopathic urge to dominate?<p>Is there a <i>REAL</i> reason to try and force me to divulge a password to a partition they did not create or modify? If so, please help me to understand.
======
jki275
It’s probably in your agreement you signed to get access to their devices.

You’re going to either give them the password, or you’re going to spend a
fortune defending a lawsuit that you’re going to lose.

And at the end you’re likely to end up unable to get a job in the field ever
again.

~~~
throwaway201979
Then I’m going to let exactly that happen.

