It's my understanding that, while one is obligated to comply with a warrant granting police access to places or materials in one's control, one cannot be compelled to aid them in their search or understanding. In other words, if presented with a warrant, a person would be required to grant access to a home or to hand over an accounting ledger, but the Fifth Amendment protects against being compelled to tell police where in the home drugs are hidden or which line items in the ledger contain embezzlement. A warrant grants the police the right to search, but not the right to find.
With that in mind, here's a thought exercise:
Let's say that I'm caught on camera signing a document with a man who later kills my business partner. The camera then records me going into my warehouse with the document and emerging later without it. The police, believing that I arranged the murder and that the proof is in the document, duly obtain a warrant to search the warehouse.
The warehouse is large and when the police enter, they find it is stacked floor to ceiling with sheets of paper, all indistinguishable except for their contents. They estimate the number of pages to be in the billions -- far too many for them to feasibly comb through.
If I understand the right against self incrimination correctly, I can't be forced to tell the police where I hid the specific piece of paper they're looking for.
Why is this different from finding a password? Assume we use a 43 character password (since the encryption key is AES 256, a password longer than 43 characters wouldn't add additional security). If this is the case, approximately 1.01e86 - 1 passwords effectively yield a garbage document, and 1 password produces the document the police are looking for. If one can't be compelled to help the police find the solution in a physical search space, why can one be compelled to help find one in a digital search space?
With that in mind, here's a thought exercise:
Let's say that I'm caught on camera signing a document with a man who later kills my business partner. The camera then records me going into my warehouse with the document and emerging later without it. The police, believing that I arranged the murder and that the proof is in the document, duly obtain a warrant to search the warehouse.
The warehouse is large and when the police enter, they find it is stacked floor to ceiling with sheets of paper, all indistinguishable except for their contents. They estimate the number of pages to be in the billions -- far too many for them to feasibly comb through.
If I understand the right against self incrimination correctly, I can't be forced to tell the police where I hid the specific piece of paper they're looking for.
Why is this different from finding a password? Assume we use a 43 character password (since the encryption key is AES 256, a password longer than 43 characters wouldn't add additional security). If this is the case, approximately 1.01e86 - 1 passwords effectively yield a garbage document, and 1 password produces the document the police are looking for. If one can't be compelled to help the police find the solution in a physical search space, why can one be compelled to help find one in a digital search space?