EFF: forced disclosure of encryption password violates 5th Amendment
Suppose you've been charged with a crime and the police have obtained a warrant to seize the contents of a safe you keep in your house. American courts have ruled that the 5th Amendment does not protect you from being compelled to open the safe.<p>That precedent doesn't bode well for this case. I don't see a qualitative difference between the contents of a safe and those of an encrypted drive.<p>One workaround: fail-deadly. Automatically wipe the encrypted data if the password isn't entered every n days. With a small enough n, the courts can't move fast enough to get the data before it's gone. (Whether this scheme constitutes obstruction of justice, I have no idea.)