Very true. The supreme court already ruled against the first amendment in making child pornography illegal, it is scary to think that now CP will cause them to additionally rule against the fifth amendment. The government has thus far attempted to keep the issue away from the supreme court because the implications of a ruling in favor of the fifth amendment are enormous. The FBI is already throwing an enormous tantrum about how difficult encryption has made their job, pretty much people who use FDE greatly complicate matters for the FBI. In most CP cases the feds assume that no encryption is being used, generally they are correct. Their operational procedures against the average person detected with CP do not include techniques for trying to circumvent encryption. For example, they rarely attempt to use keyloggers of any sort, almost never try cold boot attacks and almost never try to hack into the suspects machine remotely to confirm CP or obtain encryption passwords. Rather they simply use trivial traffic analysis techniques to compile lists of suspect IP addresses, and then after sorting the list based on the sort of CP involved they go through the list obtaining warrants for raids. When they raid they usually just knock on the door or in some cases kick the door in, unplug all electronic devices and ship them off to a forensic lab. They rarely even have on site forensics people, and in many cases the computer is not booted up during the raid because they don't go to the trouble of trying to determine if it is or not. They very rarely follow a different sort of operational procedure, usually when they do it is in cases where the suspect is part of a CP ring that is known to use encryption, or if the suspect is known to have hundreds of thousands of images. This means that in the majority of cases, simply encrypting your entire drive with FDE is enough to protect you from the FBI securing enough evidence to convict you of a CP offense. The FBI does not have the resources to carry out complex operations against all suspect CP offenders in a dragnet fashion, so they are really banking on being able to force people to decrypt anything that is encrypted. Certainly even FDE is not perfect at hiding the contents of your drive. FDE has some pretty big assumptions associated with its security guarantees; the passphrase must be very entropic (most people do not have sufficient passphrases, even if they think they do), the partition/drive must not be mounted when the system is seized, the passphrase must not be stolen with a keylogger or by hacking or other techniques, the actual implementation of the FDE system must be correct, etc. A good technique, suggested by Bruce Schneier, is to use two layers of encryption; FDE for general encryption of the entire drive, and something like GPG to encrypt individual files. This way if you are compromised with a currently mounted FDE drive, the individual files you are not using are still encrypted. Even this is not perfect though. Indeed.