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Comment by brw12 | Hacker News Reader

No, you're exactly wrong. The demand on Rawls is that he do whatever work is necessary to produce the drives in an unencrypted state. If he hid a printout of the password on Mount Everest, that means he is compelled by the court to climb Mount Everest.

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I'm speaking in practical terms here. I haven't read the actual order, but I understand the language of the order may technically require him to do the work necessary to render his drives in a decrypted state. That's because they expect the only requirement to be entering the key.

If he had a password hidden on Mt. Everest and demonstrated that to the court's satisfaction, and then cooperated with the court's order to reasonably assist in decryption (e.g., allowing the court access to the sherpa that routinely retrieves this key and enters it to decrypt his disks via some remote mechanism), I assume he would be considered compliant.

And that is the fucking problem. It's a principled issue and you admit that it is. What your arguing about is how much is enough to violate the principle. Since people can only agree on principles, you shouldn't kill, then the law needs to fucking operate on principle alone.

This explanation (and the other forms in which it's presented in this thread) is really troubling to me. It sounds like in order to offer a defense of the inability to comply with the order, the accused has to provide evidence which could be used against him in the trial. In your example, the existence of the password on Mt Everest could be used against him, and was evidence the prosecution probably could not have discovered but for his compelled testimony. It's even more troubling in the case of the Sherpa: revealing the identity of an accomplice (as it were) is surely self-incriminating!

But if this were really how he obtains the password (and similar schemes of off-site passwords and accomplices aren't so outlandish in the case of servers which might require the keys on reboot a few times per year), how could he possibly defend himself from the contempt charge? It sickens me to imagine being in the same situation. If this isn't an instance of the cruel trilemma, I don't know what is =(

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