Quote from: Emeraldshop on October 09, 2012, 10:03 amInteresting case... it looks like we finally give away the password and was convicted.Yes, he was eventually forced to divulge his passphrase and was convicted. The reason why he was forced to give up his passphrase hinges on the particular facts of the case. Because the laptop was never shutdown all the way, but rather was hibernated, the encrypted volume was never closed and dismounted. All that it took for the customs officer to see the contents of the encrypted drive (drive Z) was for them to resume the laptop from its hibernated state. As soon as the customs officer did that, they went into drive Z and observed the contraband materials. After the laptop was shutdown, the encrypted volume was closed and dismounted; another customs officer was later unable to open it. The problem with Boucher asserting a 5th Amendment defense in this particular case is that the Customs officer had already observed the contraband on the encrypted volume. This meant that he government already knew there was contraband on the machine, thus Boucher's right not to incriminate himself failed, because the result was a foregone conclusion -- he had already effectively incriminated himself when the officer saw the contraband. If, on the other hand, Boucher had shut the laptop down completely, and the encrypted drive volume was closed and dismounted, then he would have been in a much stronger position to assert his 5th Amendment rights. In that case, the government would not have been able to prove the existence of contraband; the government could suspect the existence of contraband, but they could not prove it, and under the 5th Amendment, Boucher could have validly invoked his right to refuse to incriminate himself. Boucher's problem with invoking the 5th lay in that the government had already seen the contraband that he was invoking his 5th Amendment right over to prevent the government from seeing, thus bringing in the legal doctrine of "foregone conclusion". For our purposes here, the essential lesson to take away is that the government couldn't crack the encrypted drive in almost two years of effort.