...but you do have to give up your passwords

Interesting and depressing post from Ars Technica:

A federal judge has ruled that a Colorado woman can be compelled to decrypt her encrypted laptop so that the police can inspect it for incriminating evidence. The woman, Ramona Fricosu, is a defendant in a mortgage scam case. She had argued that the Fifth Amendment’s privilege against self-incrimination protected her from having to disclose the password to her hard drive, which was encrypted using PGP Desktop.

The rest of the sordid details can be found here.

It seems to me that forcing someone to reveal a password to  a computer which might contain incriminating documents should be construed in the same way as forcing them to provide other self incriminating testimony.   Just saying…