US Judge says Withholding Password for Encrypted System is OK

In an article that brings forward an item first noted in December of last year, Slashdot again notes that there has been at least one ruling in the US about whether or not a person can be forced to divulge the password to unlock their encrypted computer system. I have to say that I missed this originally and to a certain extent am relieved since I've been watching with growing concern the changes taking place in border inspections of computers and other digital hardware in the name of "security." We have seen laptops seized at borders and not returned for days - with no guarantee that the contents copied from them are deleted or who has seen them and retained copies.

Business people from some large companies are now being handed "naked" laptops - just the operating system and no data - by their IT people and told to "download anything you need once you get there" to keep company secrets from leaking out and keep stupid executives who may have inadvertently surfed to bad sites that left porn or whatever from being thrown in jail.

My friend David Ingram sent out a set of dire warnings recently to his thousands of viewers noting that the Dept. of Homeland Security has finally owned up to their policies in this regard, and even the open source TrueCrypt disk encryption software makers have tried to deal with the problem by making their software include "Plausible Deniability" by adding a second "benign" disk image to their file system to fool the guards.

• News.Cnet.com original article on the judgement