The Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution says that no person shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself. A current case gives us a chance to reconsider this basic civil right.
The defendant is a Canadian with US Residency. Border agents examined his laptop and discovered it contained child pornography. When the cops tried to inspect the laptop, they couldn’t get to an encrypted part of the hard drive. A grand jury issued a subpoena for the password, but the defendant filed a motion to quash, based on the Fifth Amendment.
A United States Magistrate Judge granted the motion to quash. He ruled that the Fifth Amendment forbids the government from making the defendant testify against himself by disclosing the password. The government is free to try to crack the password code, but they concede this may be impossible.
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