For contempt of court charges it only requires that the judge believe the individual to be in contempt and there is no appeal.

It can be rather tough to prove that the individual is lying, but it does happen on occasion and in practice most people are just not tough enough to stand up to interrogation on that. They'll usually blab to somebody eventually.

They're appealing this and it's not even been established by the courts that she even can decrypt the disk (seriously, if you took my disk away from me for a month I might not be able to decrypt it either).

The problem here is the potential for civil contempt charges (which are starting to take some heat in the US because they deny haebeus corpus, unlike criminal contempt charges). One man spent 14 years in jail on civil contempt charges, on the theory that he was free to leave at any time by simply complying with the court order (to turn over 2.5 million dollars to the divorce court which he claimed was lost in bad investments). Actually he may still be there, but I think he was recently released by another judge's intervention.

It is illegal to compel someone to do something they cannot, under US law, and if she cannot decrypt the drive, that is that (even if you think she's lying) or at least it should be. I fully expect SCOTUS to rule on this at some point, but the previous rulings in cases where defendants had to decrypt were very narrow (i.e. the witnesses for the prosecution already knew what was on there and had had previous access, they'd then powered down the machine and lost access). I'm not saying I really agree with that ruling, but almost all the rulings of the nature we're discussing here have gone the other way in the US.

Yes, in the US you can be forced to hand over a safe key, if you possess it. However, it has been generally held you cannot be forced to hand over the contents of your mind. The prosecution is trying to do an end run around this by claiming they don't want to know or be witness to the password (i.e. the contents of her mind) they simply want her to provide them with the decrypted contents of the drive. This argument is obvious horseshit to me, but it's the kind of thing our legal system wrangles over constantly.

Also, as some have erroneously claimed, on other message boards, that the founding fathers never could have expected encryption I'd like to point out, not only is this bullshit historically, but many of them used encryption, including Thomas Jefferson. They were well aware of the implications to our laws when they wrote them.

They shouldn't have to, in the US we have the fifth amendment which covers those situations. Also the fourth amendment and a few other protections as well. A shocking number of people end up being cleared of the original crime only to be convicted and sentenced for obstruction and or perjury charges.

It really ought to be that way everywhere as lying, destroying evidence and otherwise obstructing justice shouldn't be required.

He can't prove it and doesn't need to, look up "civil contempt". Of course charging someone with civil contempt for this also violates other laws but that might not stop a dick judge.

That's probably not true. Encryption already existed at that time IIRC and some of the cyphers available even before that time went uncracked until only recently. Encryption was a lot simpler back then, but it was still something in use and something that the founding faters should have been aware of.

Funny again. A suspect shouldn't be prosecuted for destroying evidence, because that's what every sane criminal normally do (wipe out fingerprints for example).

If you are ever arrested or questioned the only thing you should say is "Am I free to go?", if the answer is "No" you reply "I want a lawyer", you never speak to anyone except him. You never take the stand. I'm not 100% sure, maybe someone can clear it up, but I don't think you can be deposed in criminal proceedings, only civil.

I know you want to think you're "smarter" than the cops or think they're trying to help you but they aren't and they actually cannot, even if they wanted to, any testimony from an officer that helps your case will be objected to as hearsay by the prosecution and thrown out. Thinking you can outwit a cop, even a dumb cop, at what they do every day, is like hopping in the ring with a pro boxer and expecting to punch his ass out. It ain't gonna happen/

It's a bit less broad than that. I'm not aware of any case where that's happened. Normally it's what happens when you go back and destroy evidence after the fact. The prosecution can't prove that the fingerprints were wiped rather than the suspect wearing gloves. They can usually prove though that documents were shredded after the investigation started and similar.

The fact that it's not a crime in other jurisdictions is really pretty screwed up as it means that you either have to let guilty people walk that were able to destroy the case or you allow people to be convicted with less than enough evidence.

Really, our system has flaws, but in this area ours is vastly superior to the other options. And for some crimes destroying the evidence and taking the rap for that is preferable as you do less time.

That's what I said, isn't it?

Simon Singh's The Code Book provides a terribly interesting look at the history of encryption and its historical implications. Book ciphers based on lost works may be essentially uncrackable (see the third letter of The Beale Papers as a possible example of this), but the Vigenere cipher turned out to be just as weak to frequency analysis as some of its predecessors.

Right, also keep in mind that the Miranda rights come in rather randomly and that as you point out the point where you're arrested is the point where you aren't able to leave. Rarely if ever do they read a suspect their rights at the moment of arrest.

OTOH, around here it's becoming more common for the police to be wired at all times, which means that a lot of that conduct is going to be on tape. We've had a lot of trouble with civil rights violations locally over the last few years and our police are presently under supervision for use of force.

It's a job of juristidction to secure evidence. To secure evidence is to make sure they will not be destroyed.

There was a case in Poland , I believe, when a suspect has eaten a document because prosecutor went to smoke a cigarette.

But when somebody breaks into prosecutors office, etc. it's not a problem to convict him for breaking and entering for example...

And for example, you may arrest a suspect if there's reasonable thought that he may destroy the evidence.

When evidence is destroyed after investigation started, it's authorities fault to let that happen.

Yep, I misread your post, apparently if you miss the word "erroneous" your post means something completely different. Perhaps I need to relax, drink a cup of tea and try and get some rest.

It's truecrypt, there is no backdoor if you properly installed it.

That's completely unrealistic. It's one thing in cases where there's only one site to secure. But often times evidence will be strewn over a large field or for things like racketeering and money laundering will be spread over multiple sites. Unless the police know about all those sites and execute search warrants on them concurrently there's no way that they could possibly secure them all before people start destroying evidence.