re fifth amendment and passwords in article apr bernina ethz ch caronni nessie cs id ethz ch germano caronni writes just a question as a provider of a public bbs service aren t you bound by law to gurantee intelligble access to the data of the users on the bbs if police comes with sufficent authorisation i guessed this would be a basic condition for such systems i did run a bbs some time ago but that was in switzerland that sounds like an old dragnet episode joe and i went to the apartment of prime suspect nobody answered the door but his landlord gave us permission to search the apartment perhaps that worked in california in the s but as i understand the law landlords do not have authority to grant permission to search space rented by a third party provided the lease is not in default etc i m not even sure if they can provide the master key when shown a search warrant since the subject of the search is supposed to be notified at this point the question becomes did the user rent the disk space her encrypted file occupies if she did it should fall under the same body of case law that applies to apartments storage lockers etc as to whether any court would recognize this fact if she did not i e no compensation exchanged i don t know how it would be treated there doesn t seem to be a non cyberspace equivalent bear giles bear fsl noaa gov
