the fifth amendment to the united states constitution protects witnesses from being forced to incriminate themselves, and there is currently no law regarding key disclosure in the united states. however, the federal case "in re boucher" may be influential as case law. in this case, a man's laptop was inspected by customs agents and child pornography was discovered. the device was seized and powered-down, at which point disk encryption technology made the evidence unavailable. the judge held that it was a foregone conclusion that the content exists since it had already been seen by the customs agents, boucher's encryption password "adds little or nothing to the sum total of the government's information about the existence and location of files that may contain incriminating information."