Answer me this, because I really don&#x27;t know:<p>Back in the 1700s, if you wrote a private letter (on paper&#x2F;parchment, with a feather ink pen as they had back then), in a foreign language, and the court system wanted to use this as evidence, could the government compel you to translate it?<p>Or, suppose you developed your own cipher (they had ciphers back then, I&#x27;m sure).  Could the government compel you to decipher the message back then?<p>The use of encryption really isn&#x27;t much different from this.