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 the us doesn t yet have many laws covering bbss they re not common carriers they re not phone companies they re just private machines or services operated by businesses there s no obligation to keep records as perry metzger points out if the police come with a search warrant you have to let them see what the warrant demands if it exists and they generally can confiscate the equipment as evidence which is not constitutionally valid but we re only beginning to develop court cases supporting us a court may be able to compel you to tell them information you know such as the encryption password for the disk there aren t any definitive cases yet since it s a new situation and there probably aren t laws specifically covering it but the court can t force you to know the keys and there are no laws preventing you from allowing your users to have their own keys for their own files without giving them to you even in areas that do have established law there is uncertainty there was a guy in idaho a few years ago who had his business records subpoenaed as evidence for taxes or some other business restriction law so he gave the court the records which were in hebrew the us doesn t have laws forcing you to keep your records in english and these were the originals of the records he didn t speak hebrew and neither did anybody in the court organization don t think they were able to do much about it it might be illegal for your bbs to deny access to potential customers based on race religion national origin gender or sexual preference it probably hasn t been tested in court but it seems like a plausible extension of anti discrimination laws affecting other businesses pray for peace bill bill stewart wcs anchor att com at t bell labs m holmdel nj no i m from new jersey i only work in cyberspace white house commect line fax
