Defendant ordered to decrypt laptop has forgotten the password

[thewayne]

Her attorney said that it wasn't clear to him if she installed the software herself. She has not yet declared this in court, so the prosecution hasn't announced any plans to deal with this yet.

I wouldn't think it would be hard to compel her to provide a list of possible passwords then run permutations of those against the encrypted image. But you run in to the easy bypass of providing them with a list of reasonable yet wrong passwords that stand zero chance of decrypting the drive.

I'm also curious if the prosecution and investigating law enforcement agency followed procedure and are doing their forensic examination from a cloned image of the drive and not messing with the drive itself, otherwise they open an argument for the defense that their messing with the computer has corrupted the drive and it cannot be decrypted. They probably did, but cases have been lost before where investigating authorities haven't followed correct procedure.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/02/forgotten-password/

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/02/07/0327233/defendant-ordered-to-decrypt-laptop-claims-she-had-forgotten-password

Comments

[silveradept]

This really is a case where someone could give authorities the run-around even though their 5th Amendment right have been told they don't exist. I wonder whether law enforcememnt will have to start using their surveillance technique better so as to avoid being beaten by an encrypted drive.